Newly released emails show that United States immigration officials worked with Tehran to deport more than a hundred Iranians on three flights between September 2025 and January 2026.

The period covered by those flights ended weeks before the United States and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February.

Why this is unusual

Deportation requires cooperation. A receiving country must issue travel documents and agree to accept the aircraft; without that, a removal order cannot be carried out however final it is. Countries that decline to cooperate are the reason people with removal orders remain in the United States for years.

Iran has historically been in that category. The two governments have no diplomatic relations. There is no US embassy in Tehran, no Iranian embassy in Washington, and communication runs through intermediaries — traditionally the Swiss.

So three charter flights carrying more than a hundred people, arranged across that gap during a period of escalating hostility, describe a working channel between two governments that were otherwise on a path to war. That is the part worth pausing on, and it has had almost no attention.

The question the emails raise

The obvious concern about deporting people to Iran is what happens when they land. Some Iranians in the American immigration system have asylum claims based on religious conversion, political activity, sexual orientation or family association — categories where return carries documented risk. Others do not, and are simply people whose visas expired.

The published reporting does not establish which category the deportees fell into, and it would be wrong to assume. What can be said is that when a removal is arranged directly with the government a person may have claimed to fear, the coordination itself creates a risk: the receiving state knows who is arriving and why they left.

The legal principle at stake is non-refoulement — the rule against returning someone to a country where they face a real risk of serious harm. It applies to individuals on the facts of their case, not to nationalities as a whole. A deportation to Iran is not automatically a violation, and each of these hundred-plus cases would have to be examined on its own terms. None of them has been, publicly.

The defence

The case for these flights, as immigration authorities have made it in comparable situations, has three parts.

Removal orders issued by immigration courts are lawful decisions that the executive is obliged to carry out. People subject to them have generally had the opportunity to make asylum claims, and those claims were adjudicated. And detaining people indefinitely because their country of origin will not take them back is itself a harm — one that courts in several jurisdictions have found unlawful.

On that account, establishing a channel with a hostile government to execute lawful orders is not a scandal but a diplomatic achievement of a narrow, technical kind.

The counter-argument from immigration lawyers is about the adjudication rather than the removal: that asylum determinations for Iranian nationals have been made under time pressure and evidentiary standards that do not always capture risk accurately, and that a removal executed by direct arrangement with Tehran removes any margin for a wrong decision.

What is not known

Several things, and they matter more than the headline figure. Whether any of those removed had pending appeals. What Iran was told about each individual, and in what form. Whether the channel has continued since February. And whether anyone has been able to establish what happened to the deportees after arrival — which, in the absence of an American diplomatic presence in Iran, no US agency is positioned to do.

The last of those is the durable problem. A government that cannot monitor what happens to the people it returns is relying entirely on the assurances of the state receiving them.

Sources

Emails and flight details reported by Democracy Now, carried by Havana Times.