U.S. Deports Planeload of Iranians After Deal With Tehran, Officials Say

The Trump administration deported a planeload of Iranians back to Iran from the United States after a deal between the two governments, according to two senior Iranian officials involved in the negotiations and a U.S. official with knowledge of the plans.

The deportations are one of the starkest signs yet of the Trump administration’s determination to expel undocumented migrants, regardless of the human rights conditions of the countries they might be sent to.

Iranian officials said that the U.S.-chartered flight took off from a military airport in Alexandra, La., on Monday evening. It made a stop in Puerto Rico to pick up more deportees, then was headed to Doha, Qatar. And after that the deportees will be put on another chartered flight to Tehran.

On Monday, Abolfazl Mehrabadi, director of Iran’s interest section in Washington, who was leading the coordination with American officials, said the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement department had informed Iran that 120 of its citizens would be on the flight. But on Tuesday, he said, the Iranians were told that 55 people were on the plane and that the rest would travel later.

Mr. Mehrabadi said that many of the deportees had been lingering for months in detention facilities, their asylum cases rejected, and that they had accepted voluntary deportation because the alternative would have been deportation to a third country like Sudan or Somalia.

“Iran’s government does not like to see any Iranian in detention or lost in a third country, and they face no problems returning,” Mr. Mehrabadi said.

He said there were about 300 Iranians in detention and about 2,500 facing threat of deportation from the United States.

For decades, the United States gave shelter to Iranians fleeing their homeland, which has one of the harshest human rights records in the world. Iran persecutes women’s rights activists, political dissidents, journalists and lawyers, religious minorities and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, among others.

But earlier this year, the United States deported a group of Iranians, many converts to Christianity who face persecution at home, to Costa Rica and Panama. The expanding deportation campaign against undocumented migrants from many countries has prompted lawsuits by immigrant advocates.

The identities of the Iranians deported and their reasons for trying to immigrate to the United States were not immediately clear, but some details are trickling out.

Among them were a 30-year-old woman who is a Christian convert; a 36-year-old man — the father of a newborn — who is an ethnic minority and political dissident in Iran; and a young man who had come to the United States with dreams of economic prosperity.

In the past several years, there has been an increase in Iranian migrants arriving at the southern U.S. border and crossing illegally. Many have claimed fear of persecution back home for their political and religious beliefs.

One of the deportees, the dissident, was being held in Houston, did not want to return, and was forced on the flight, according to his wife and his lawyer, Ali Herischi.

Mr. Herischi said that he also represented the Christian convert, and that both clients had crossed the border from Mexico. The man entered in February, accompanied by his pregnant wife, and the woman with her husband in October 2024.

Mr. Herischi asked that the names of his clients not be used, lest they face persecution in Iran.

He said he found out about the deportations by reading news reports, then got confirmation from a contact at ICE that his clients were among those sent home.

“Neither of my clients consented to deportation,” Mr. Herischi said. “They did not want to go, they did not sign anything. Their families are devastated.”

The dissident’s wife said in a telephone interview that the last time she spoke with her husband was on Saturday, and that he had had no indication that he would be imminently deported. She said she and the baby are out of detention and staying with family pending her asylum hearing.

Until now, the United States had only infrequently deported migrants to countries like Iran, in part because of a lack of regularized diplomatic relations. That forced American officials to either hold migrants in detention or release them into the United States. In 2024, The United States deported about two dozen Iranians, the highest total in years.

The State Department approached Iran’s interest section in Washington about three months ago about coordinating the deportation of Iranian migrants, according to the two Iranian officials. Iran had to verify their identities and provide travel documents for some.

The two Iranian officials said the deportees included men and women, some of them couples. Some had volunteered after being in detention for months, and some had not, they said. The officials said that in nearly every case, asylum requests had been denied or the people had not yet had an asylum hearing.

The deportation marked a rare moment of cooperation between the United States and the Iranian government. Hossein Noushabadi, the director general of parliamentary affairs in Iran’s foreign ministry, said on Tuesday that U.S. immigration authorities planned to deport 400 Iranians to Iran over the coming months.

The Iranians will be returning to a country where they may face not only government oppression but also an economic and energy crisis with plunging currency, sky-high inflation, unemployment, and water and power cuts. The economic situation appears certain to get worse with the return of U.N. Security Council sanctions that went into effect on Saturday.

The news that the U.S. government was working with Iranian government on deportations rattled some people in the diaspora. They warned that despite the guarantees by the Iranian government that the returnees would not be harmed, security forces might still target them because they often acted independently.

“Given that the Iranian government is one of the most serious human rights violators in the region, deporting Iranian migrants from the United States to Iran requires extraordinary sensitivity,” said Omid Memarian, an expert on Iran’s human rights issues at DAWN, a Washington-based group focused on American foreign policy.

An immigration rights advocate said that distraught Iranians facing deportation had called the hotline for U.N.’s refugee agency seeking help.