Iran wrote the deportation lists. ICE carried them out.

Donald Trump’s ICE is deporting Iranian asylum-seekers on lists the Iranian government wrote.

The National Iranian American Council released hundreds of internal ICE emails Tuesday. They span three flights — September 2025, December 2025, January 2026 — returning more than one hundred Iranian nationals to Tehran. Iranian officials named names. ICE officials adjusted the manifest. The correspondence runs through the planning and execution of each flight, up to the moment the planes left the ground. The Iranian government got the Iranians it asked for. Three times.

The pattern is not new. We saw local probation officers in Idaho compiling foreign-born lists for ICE at the agency’s request the week before. We saw a lawsuit last July documenting that this administration was already giving the Iranian government the immigration files of Iranian asylum seekers. This week’s email release is the paper trail. What we were told was happening was happening.

I want you to sit with what it means. The United States government, whose own Refugee Act of 1980 exists precisely to prevent this, took asylum-seekers from a country with documented persecution of its religious minorities, its political dissidents, its ethnic minorities — and delivered them to that country, on that country’s list, at that country’s request. The same flag that flies over the Statue of Liberty flew over planes carrying frightened Iranians back to the regime they fled.

This is not enforcement. The prophet Isaiah named what it looks like when a country uses its power not to protect the stranger but to deliver the stranger to the stranger’s enemy: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). The Hebrew scripture gives the command more than thirty times. “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21). “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34). The mechanism is memory. A people who once knew what it was to be the stranger are commanded to act on that knowledge when they meet the stranger at their own border.

Christ made it starker. “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me” (Matthew 25:43). The Lord of the gospel does not say, “I was an asylum-seeker and you put me on the list my persecutor wrote.” But the verse permits no illusions about what failure looks like. We are not failing to welcome. We are operating the return.

What does it mean for a country to become the agent of its adversary’s targeting list? It means the country has stopped being a country. Greg Grandin, reading our border from the south in The End of the Myth, named the longer pattern — “the promise of a two-thousand-mile-long, thirty-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel running along the United States’ southern border serves its purpose. It’s America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier.” The wall is a symbol. The list is a symbol. The list Iran wrote and ICE carried out is the twenty-first-century form of the closing. Not a wall at the border but a partnership with the regime the refugee fled. The frontier is closed. The door is wired shut. The agent of the closing is the United States itself.

We have built a system in which the deportable is decided, in significant part, by people who are not the deportable and not the Americans who live alongside them. The immigration court that signs the order is in Houston or Detroit or Newark. The list was shaped in Tehran. The pattern is the system. Iran has obvious interests of its own. It wants its dissidents, its critics, its exiles, its mixed-status families — the people who fled, or who fell out of favor — gone from American soil. When the Iranian government asks for someone to be added to a deportation list, it is asking that person be handed to it. When it asks for someone to be removed from a list, it is asking that person be left in place. Either way, the Iranian government is exercising a kind of veto over the fate of Iranian residents of the United States that no foreign government should have. The bar of shame, which was already low, has fallen further.

Let me say what this is in the tradition I read. It is the betrayal of the stranger whom Christ calls his own. It is the operation of an apparatus in the service of a foreign power against the people the apparatus exists to protect. It is, in a word the prophets used without apology, evil. Not “concerning.” Not “complicated.” Not “regrettable.” Evil — in the same register Isaiah used when he named the inversion of good and evil that turns a nation into an instrument of its enemy’s hand.

I want to say something to the ICE officers who carried the lists out. You are not the enemy. You are people with hands that did a job. I am not exempting you. I am telling you there is a door. Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, ordered the soldiers of his own country to stop firing on their own people: “I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!” (March 23, 1980). He did not exempt the soldier. He offered the soldier a way out, in the imperative and in the open hand. The same way out is open to those of you who carried the lists. You can stop. You can refuse. You can take the document your conscience reads and the law of God — which says do not hand the stranger back to the stranger’s enemy — and obey the law of God before the order of men.

I want to say something else, in the tradition of confession the gospel requires. We who have known sanctuary in this country — Mexican-Americans, Central Americans, the people for whom the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality were first opened — we have not always stood up for Iranian refugees when they came knocking. We have not always named what was happening to them as what it was. We have not always offered the same welcome to the Persian-speaking stranger that we offered to the Spanish-speaking one. That is a failure. It is the failure the Hebrew scripture names when it commands the ger to be loved as the citizen — not sometimes, not when it is convenient, but as the citizen. We owe this correction now. We owe it to the Iranian families watching their relatives board planes to Tehran on lists Iran wrote. The United States has long used immigration enforcement as a tool of foreign policy, and my own community knows what it looks like when the list gets shaped across a border. The Mexican government has had its own quiet conversations with U.S. officials about which Mexican nationals in this country should be removed. So has every government with a diaspora in our country. The pattern predates Iran. What the NIAC emails show is the inheritance handed to a government that calls the United States its enemy.

The Iranian families on those flights were Christ. They were the Christ who fled into Egypt as an infant to escape Herod’s massacre. They were the Christ whose flight out of one persecution looks like every flight out of every persecution. And the government of the United States took them by the hand and led them back to their executioner. The door of return is not closed. It opens onto a country that does not let foreign governments pick which of its residents to deport.

Stop.