ICE heeded Iran’s last-minute changes to deportation lists
Hundreds of emails exchanged between U.S. immigration officials and their Iranian counterparts were released Tuesday by the National Iranian American Council, providing the most detailed public account yet of how the two governments coordinated three deportation flights that together returned more than 100 Iranian nationals to Iran.
The flights departed in September 2025, December 2025, and January 2026. The correspondence shows that Iranian officials influenced which Iranian immigrants in the United States were placed on the deportation lists, and that ICE officials heeded some last-minute changes to those lists at Iran’s request.
The email cache spans the planning and execution of each flight, documenting the back-and-forth between U.S. and Iranian officials over which individuals would be removed from the United States.