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Emails Show ICE Worked With Iran on Three Deportation Flights. Human Rights First Reports That a Fourth May Follow.

November 5, 2026

News. What has been reported, up to 5 November 2026, about the deportation of Iranians from the United States, to Iran and to the Central African Republic. Every statement is linked, where it is made, to the source it comes from, and the text says whether that source is a court record, a party’s filing, a government’s own words, a human rights organisation, a monitoring project or a news report. Where sources disagree, both are given. It is not advice.

Emails obtained by the National Iranian American Council and reported by the Associated Press on 20 August 2026 show ICE and Iranian officials working together on three deportation flights to Iran, in September and December 2025 and January 2026, with Iranian officials asking for names to be added to the lists. In a federal lawsuit in Washington, the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund challenges what it says is a policy of giving the Iranian government protected information about Iranian asylum seekers; the government denies that the policy exists, and on 20 October the court denied the plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction. On 29 October Human Rights First said that, according to attorneys, a fourth flight to Iran may follow. Iranians have also been among the people the United States has sent to the Central African Republic, on the flights of June, August and October 2026, and the sources count the Iranians on the August flight differently. Each item below is dated and linked to its source.

20 August: emails show ICE and Iranian officials arranging deportation flights

In a report of 20 August 2026, Safiyah Riddle of the Associated Press wrote that hundreds of emails exchanged between United States immigration officials, obtained by the National Iranian American Council, show how the two countries worked together to arrange for more than 100 Iranians to be flown back to Iran on three separate immigration flights in September and December 2025 and January 2026. The report states that Iranian officials had some influence over which Iranian immigrants in the U.S. were sent back to their home country, and that ICE officials apparently heeded some last-minute changes to deportation lists at the request of Iran. In late August 2025, a month before the first flight, an ICE official wrote: Per request from the Iran Embassy I added a few cases. Just over a week later an official with the same job title, who said they had met the Director at the Iranian Embassy, wrote: Iran has requested that I amend the previous manifest and expedite the removal process. Iranian officials were still making requests on the day the first flight left, the report states, although one official wrote that those requests were denied. Messages were sometimes passed through Qatari officials, who helped charter the deportation flights through Doha.

The report states that the former acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, called the repatriation of Iranians a priority in an email during the war of June 2025, and that the head of ICE’s removal operations, Marcos Charles, told staff to make a plan to deport 58 Iranians with final removal orders who were then in ICE custody: We need a plan forward ASAP. It reports that On several occasions, the emails show ICE officials arranging for Iranian officials to meet for unspecified reasons with people detained in the U.S., and that Iranian officials acknowledged in September 2025 that as many as 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump administration. It adds: It is not clear whether the people Iran put on the list had volunteered to repatriate or if they were forced.

The report describes the rules at issue: The U.S. government is allowed to work with government officials of foreign countries to coordinate deportation logistics. However, federal regulations passed in the late 1990s prohibit the government from sharing information that could reveal that the person getting deported applied for asylum. It records that the emails echo testimony in a lawsuit filed in a Washington, D.C., court in July, in which eleven Iranians in immigration detention said they had been forced to meet Iranian government officials who, according to their sworn declarations, knew intimate details about their asylum claims. The Department of Homeland Security did not comment in response to the Associated Press’s request; of the lawsuit, it had said in July: These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE. On this site: Iran.

7 July to 3 November: the lawsuit over information given to Iran

In Iranian American Legal Defense Fund v. Rubio, No. 1:26-cv-02375 (D.D.C.), filed on 7 July 2026 against the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the heads of those agencies, the plaintiff seeks, in its own words, vacatur of Defendants’ policy of providing the Iranian government information about Iranian asylum seekers that is protected by 8 C.F.R. §§ 208.6 and 236.1(e). In its pre-hearing submissions of 8 October it states that it first based that allegation on declarations from Iranian asylum seekers, on reporting in The New York Times, and on a declaration by Cyrus Mehri describing conversations in which a senior official of the Iranian Interests Section told him that, since a meeting at the State Department in March 2025, the United States has been providing the Iranian government with detained Iranians’ immigration files, including confidential asylum information. It filed supplemental declarations from six of the asylum seekers. According to one, an Iranian official meeting a group of detainees told them: I know you have applied for asylum. According to another, an Iranian official said she had my whole case file in her hands, and that this was all sent to them by ICE. It also filed emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which, it says, confirm that the Iranian Interests Section was involved in selecting which Iranian individuals would be removed; in one, an ICE official wrote three days before the flight of 29 September 2025 that [t]he Iran Embassy … requested that [three individuals] be added to the flight.

The government denies that the policy exists. The same filing states: Defendants denied that the policy exists based solely on a single ICE official’s declaration that DHS does not have an agreement with the government of Iran to provide it with protected information. According to the filing, the court concluded at a hearing on 5 August that it needed more information as to whether the challenged policy exists before it could rule on the motion for preliminary relief, and its questions included whether Iranians are being removed to third countries.

Judge Ana C. Reyes held an evidentiary hearing on 15 October, at which the government’s witnesses were Noah Adams and Gerald Evans, Jr.; the minute entry records the motion for a preliminary injunction as heard and denied. The minute order of 20 October states: For the reasons stated on the record at last week’s hearing, the Court DENIES Plaintiff’s 9 Motion for Preliminary Injunction and Section 705 Stay. The court also denied the plaintiff’s emergency motion for discovery, without prejudice, and ordered the government to provide meeting notes by 29 October for review in camera. The docket then records a sealed ex parte order signed on 27 October, a briefing schedule on 2 November and a sealed document on 3 November (docket as mirrored by the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse). The case continues. On this site: Iran.

29 October: Human Rights First on a possible fourth flight to Iran

On 29 October Human Rights First said it was extremely concerned by reports from attorneys that the administration was preparing to deport hundreds of Afghans to Afghanistan through Pakistan, and stated: Reports from attorneys also indicate that the administration may also soon send another deportation flight forcing Iranians back to Iran, the fourth since the start of the Trump administration, and the first since the beginning of the war in February. It stated that its ICE Flight Monitor tracked three prior flights to Iran via Kuwait and Qatar from fall 2025 through early 2026, and that The individuals deported have included Christian converts, ethnic minorities, and political dissidents. Its President and CEO, Uzra Zeya, said: By creating arrangements with countries such as Kuwait, Qatar, and now Pakistan, the Trump administration is effectuating removals to active war zones and severe security crises where individuals may be at grave risk.

On 2 November ICE Flight Monitor wrote that the ICE Air flight set to carry out deportations to Afghanistan and Iran, via a removal-transfer stop in Pakistan, will likely take place on a large Eastern Air carrier, and on 3 November that The ICE Air removal flight that was expected to carry Afghans to Pakistan today has been postponed; the post of 3 November does not mention Iranians. ICE Flight Monitor’s posts to 4 November do not report that a flight to Iran has taken place. Two flights to Iran planned for 2026 did not go ahead, according to the plaintiff’s filings in the Washington case: one scheduled for March 2026, which was canceled due to the war (pre-hearing submissions, 8 October), and one at the end of July 2026, which, the plaintiff states, was cancelled only after hostilities resumed between the United States and Iran (notice of 1 September). On this site: Iran.

June to October: Iranians sent to the Central African Republic

Iranians are recorded on the flights the United States sent to the Central African Republic on 12 June, 29 August and 23 October 2026. Human Rights Watch reported on 29 June that the people sent on 12 June came from countries including Iran, almost all of whom had US court-ordered protections against deportation to their countries of origin due to fears of persecution or torture, and that this was the first time an African state participating in a US third-country transfer agreement has accepted people from Iran and Afghanistan. Its report of 8 October states, citing news accounts, that one Iranian woman in that group had protection because she had converted to Christianity and another because of her opposition to the Iranian government (HRW, To Scare People, p. 43); Reuters reported on 12 June that, of three Iranian women the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund had said were at risk of deportation, the convert among them, only the activist was on the flight, according to a lawyer, Emily Trostle. The two accounts have not been reconciled.

For the flight of 29 August the counts of Iranians differ. Human Rights Watch gives approximately 20 people from Afghanistan and 10 from Iran among 43 people (HRW, To Scare People, p. 43); Third Country Deportation Watch, 17 Afghans, 6 Iranians; and the Associated Press, citing Savi Arvey of Human Rights First, 12 Afghans and eight Iranians. In a notice filed on 1 September in the Washington case, the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund stated that between 26 and 28 August it learned that the United States planned to remove at least eight Iranians to the Central African Republic (CAR), that At least six of these individuals had been granted withholding of removal, preventing their removal to Iran, and that Six of the Iranian chosen for removal were removed to CAR, and two were returned to detention in Adams County, Mississippi, due to Immigration and Customs Enforcement logistical delays. The four accounts have not been reconciled.

The same notice states that the plaintiff understands that the United States Government has previously allowed the Government of Iran to choose which Iranians would be removed, citing the Associated Press report of 20 August, and that it does not know whether the Government of Iran was involved in selecting these eight individuals for removal and does not know what information the United States shared with Iran or CAR about these eight individuals. It records that at the hearing of 5 August the court asked the government whether Iranian asylum seekers were being removed to third countries, and that Counsel for the Government said that he did not know the answer.

The fourth flight landed in Bangui in the early hours of 24 October, local time, ICE Flight Monitor reported. Third Country Deportation Watch records that nationals of Cuba, Venezuela, Türkiye, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iran and Nicaragua were among the 78 third country nationals removed to CAR; it does not say how many were Iranian. Its overview page quotes Senator Shaheen, speaking on WAMU’s 1A, on an Afghan man and a woman from Iran who was a pro democracy activist, who both had been given US protections, and they were sent to the Central African Republic, where they have no connection. Whether anyone sent to the Central African Republic has been returned to Iran is still being investigated. On this site: Central African Republic and Iran.

1 and 4 November: Hengaw on executions and death sentences in Iran

The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights reported on 1 November that Iranian authorities executed at least 85 prisoners, including six political prisoners, in October 2026, and that the total number of executions documented by Hengaw since the beginning of 2026 had reached at least 689. On 4 November it reported that a 42-year-old political prisoner held in Evin Prison has been sentenced to death on charges of corruption on earth, that, according to his lawyer, the court imposed the sentence in connection with his online activities, and that the nine charges he faced included communicating and exchanging information with individuals affiliated with Israel. On this site: Iran.

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