U.S. immigration officials worked with Iran to deport Iranians in 2025, newly released emails show, revealing a working relationship between the US and Iranian governments despite tensions mounting between the countries.
It’s not clear who ended up on the flight, which ended up being much smaller than initially planned. Iranian officials were still making requests the day the flight departed, although one official wrote that those requests were denied. In a September 26 email, just three days before the deportation flight left U.S. soil, an ICE official said in an email that the Iranian Embassy was still making requests for three additional Iranians on the flight.
“Per request from the Iran Embassy I added a few cases,” one unnamed ICE official wrote in late August, a month before the first deportation flight in September. Just over a week later, someone with the same job title moved to make another, unspecified change to the deportation list after they said they met with the “Director at the Iranian Embassy. “Iran has requested that I amend the previous manifest and expedite the removal process,” the official wrote.
The deportation of Iranians to a country whose government has a pattern of violent persecution against women, religious minorities and political dissidents has drawn significant criticism from human rights activists. It is not clear from the emails how frequently U.S. immigration officials had direct contact with the Iranian government. Charles wrote. Another official, whose name was redacted, urged colleagues to “identify a solution for this White House priority. Trump’s assertions that the U.S. is at war with Iran to save ordinary Iranians from a repressive regime.
Iranian officials acknowledged in September 2025 that as many as 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump administration.
They said most of the Iranians had crossed into the U.S. from Mexico illegally, while some faced other immigration issues. Sometimes messages were conveyed through Qatari officials, who helped charter the deportation flights through Doha, but other times officials reference regular meetings with the “Iranian delegation,” the “Director at the Iranian Embassy”, and other unnamed Iranian officials. “We need a plan forward ASAP,” Mr. Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, said the emails undermine Mr. Eleven Iranians in immigration detention said they were forced to meet with Iranian government officials while in ICE detention. Those Iranian authorities knew intimate details about their asylum claims, according to the sworn declarations filed in a Washington, DC, court in July. “These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE,” DHS said in a statement in July.
