The Trump administration has reached a deal to deport about 400 Iranian immigrants to Iran, a senior official in Tehran said, which would mark a rare display of cooperation between the two countries that immediately raised concerns among human rights advocates for the immigrants’ safety.
Hossein Noushabadi, director general for parliamentary and consular affairs at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said Tuesday that 120 immigrants are scheduled to fly to their native country, with a stopover in Qatar, this week, according to the Tasnim News Agency, Iran’s semiofficial news outlet.
“These individuals are Iranians who left the country legally. However they entered the United States is another matter,” Noushabadi said, the outlet reported. “Their return to the homeland faces no obstacle, as Iran will always support its citizens.”
The U.S. government did not confirm the report. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions from The Washington Post about the flights. The New York Times first reported the plan.
A repatriation agreement would come at a delicate time for relations between Washington and Tehran, and would mark a major turnaround for Iran, a nation that has long refused to cooperate with deportations from the United States. Months of bilateral talks over Iran’s nuclear program were abruptly upended in June when Israel launched extensive attacks against Iran, igniting a military conflict in which the U.S. bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities.
At the U.N. General Assembly last week, the U.S. supported the reimposition of economic sanctions against Iran, a move that sent the country’s currency tumbling and is likely to exacerbate a simmering energy crisis this winter.
It is unclear if Iran would get anything in return for accepting the deportees. Alex Vatanka, an analyst at the Middle East Institute, said a deportation flight would allow both the Trump administration and Tehran to declare victory, despite tense relations.
President Donald Trump could claim a win for his mass deportation campaign, and Iranian officials can claim to be protecting their citizens, Vatanka said.
“The Islamic republic, despite the horrendous things it does to its own people, likes to go out and say, ‘We protect Iranians anywhere in the world,’” he said.
Noushabadi told Tasnim that ICE has been planning to deport Iranians for months and that most of them had entered the U.S. illegally via Mexico, a number that spiked during the Biden administration.
Border Patrol apprehended 1,500 Iranians who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally under the Biden administration, compared with 40 during Trump’s first term, according to federal data. (Most of the roughly 520,000 people of Iranian descent in the United States are native-born or naturalized U.S. citizens, according to the Census Bureau.)
That leaves thousands of Iranian immigrants who could be removed under Trump’s deportation policies, including efforts to restrict humanitarian protections such as asylum. At the United Nations last week, Trump expressed skepticism about asylum seekers and said it was time to “end the failed experiment of open borders.”
Immigrant rights advocates warned that the swift removals announced by the Iranian official could endanger Iranians who have resided in the U.S. for many years.
The U.S. State Department’s human rights report on Iran last year said Tehran’s already severe crackdown on human rights had worsened. Hundreds of prisoners had been executed, including many who confessed under torture or faced unfair trials, the report said.
ICE and the Iranian government did not identify who would be among those sent to Iran. After Israel launched military strikes in June, ICE arrested a number of Iranian nationals with criminal records. Some were in their 50s or 60s and had been convicted of crimes and ordered deported decades ago. It is not clear whether any of them are scheduled to be on deportation flights.
Foreign affairs analysts and human rights advocates expressed concern that those onboard could face persecution. Earlier this year, some Iranians deported by the Trump administration to alternate countries were people who had converted to Christianity, an act Iranian law says is punishable by death.
The U.S. government has long considered Iran a “recalcitrant” country that has refused to take back its citizens. Federal authorities deported fewer than 100 Iranians during Trump’s first term. About 250 Iranians have been deported over the past dozen years, according to DHS data; more than half of them had no criminal record.
In June, Trump cited the lack of cooperation on deportations as one of the justifications for including Iran on a list of countries subject to a travel ban on its citizens coming to the U.S.
“The U.S. and Iranian governments don’t usually talk to each other and don’t usually cooperate on deportation flights, so this is new,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the nonprofit National Iranian American Council. “It’s not something that is very typical.”
He said he hoped that cooperation would lead to talks on more urgent issues, such as Iran’s nuclear program and Trump’s travel ban, which has blocked students and family members of Americans from visiting the United States.
“Iranians are kind of the collateral here, including some who might not want to go back to Iran,” Costello said. “Of all the areas for potential cooperation between the U.S. and the Iranian government, this is not one that’s going to prevent a war or arguably improve a lot of people’s lives.”