The National Iranian American Council’s release this week of the internal correspondence between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Iranian government’s liaison mission in Washington documents a function of state that the prior twenty years of immigration policy had allowed to lapse into disuse: the diplomatic coordination between the removing sovereign and the receiving sovereign over which of the receiving sovereign’s nationals shall be returned. The executive’s authority over the alien within the territory is plenary — a power the Framers lodged in the political branches without qualification, and one the Supreme Court has affirmed from Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889) forward as a necessary consequence of independent nationhood. That authority extends, by the structure of international comity, to the consultation that makes the receiving sovereign’s acceptance possible. The Immigration and Nationality Act permits removal to the country of origin or to any third country willing to receive the alien; the receiving sovereign’s identification of which of its nationals shall be accepted is the ordinary operation of the diplomatic function, for a sovereign cannot receive what it has not been asked to receive, and the asking is conducted through the channels the emails document. The lawsuit filed this summer alleging that immigration files of Iranian asylum seekers had been furnished to the Iranian government is, on this reading, not a scandal but a description of the same function working as it is designed to work: the receiving sovereign must know whom it is receiving, and the receiving sovereign’s knowledge is the condition of the removal’s lawful completion. The administration has done what the prior two decades avoided doing. It has executed the removals the statute authorized, in coordination with the receiving government, on the scale the removals require. The three flights — September 2025, December 2025, and January 2026 — together returned more than one hundred Iranian nationals to Iran. The cooperation is not new in law. The scale is new. The scale is the restoration the plenary authority requires.
While the State Department managed its diplomatic correspondence, and while Immigration and Customs Enforcement answered the emails that named the names, the men and women whose names appeared on the manifests the Iranian government helped compose were already on the planes.
We will call him nothing, for the man’s name is not the doctrine’s concern, and the city we will leave unnamed, for the same reason. He had left Iran in the year the men with the badges had come for his cousin, and his cousin had not come back from the room they had taken him to. He had walked through Turkey. He had crossed the ocean on a visa that expired before the plane landed. He had reached the southern border of the United States and asked for asylum. The asylum officer had heard his testimony — the arrest, the threat, the cousin’s disappearance, the cousin’s wife’s silence in the months that followed — and had found his fear credible. The case was pending. He had lived, for the years the case permitted him to live, in the country the case kept him in. He had found work in a warehouse in a city whose name the record does not trouble itself to keep. He had learned enough English to be understood at the counter, to understand the man who answered the phone, to read the notices the immigration court sent. He had lived.
Then the email arrived at ICE from the Iranian government liaison office, and the email was heeded. The man’s name appeared on the manifest for the December flight. ICE officers came for him at the apartment he had rented in the building where the hallways smelled of the cooking from the unit next door. They came in the early morning. They bound his wrists behind his back with the plastic strap the officers carry for the purpose. They did not tell him where they were taking him. They walked him to the van. The van drove to the airport. The plane flew east, across the Atlantic, across Europe, across the Mediterranean, across the Middle East, and put down at Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran.
At the gate, the men who had been waiting received him. They knew his name. They had his file — the asylum file the United States had shared with the Iranian government, with the date of his application, with the address he had given, with the testimony he had given the asylum officer, with the contacts he had named, with the cousin whose disappearance he had described, with the wife’s name and the wife’s address and the wife’s continued residence in Tehran. They had read what he had told the United States was the reason he could not return. They had read it because the United States had given it to them.
They took him from the gate to a room. The room was in a building the Iranian government uses for the purpose such buildings serve. The first hours were questions, and the questions were asked by men who did not accept the answers the man had given the U.S. asylum officer. The questions continued through the second day. The blows came when the answers did not satisfy; the boots struck the trunk and the legs and the small of the back; the plastic strap held the wrists behind the back for the hours the questioning sat with him; the eyes were swollen shut by the second morning; the ribs cracked under the second day’s work, and the breath came short with each inhalation. He was moved to a cell in the long-term facility where the regime holds the men and women it does not parade. The cell was small — the length of a man’s body and not much wider — and the light did not go out, and the food came at the schedule the cell kept, and the food was the food such cells serve, and he learned to eat it because the alternative was the hunger that gnawed at the empty places the beatings had made. He learned the name of the charge: espionage, cooperation with a hostile state, propaganda against the Islamic Republic. He learned the name of the sentence: a term measured in decades, with no appeal, with no contact from the outside, with no review of the file the United States had shared with the men who had asked the questions. He lost more than a quarter of his weight in the months that followed — the muscle going first from the arms, then the thighs, then the face, until the man the cell held was not the man who had stood in the warehouse a season before. He did not see his wife. He did not see a lawyer. He did not see the light of day. The cell was his country now.
He had asked the United States for protection; the asylum officer had found his fear credible; the case was pending. Then the United States had handed the file to the government he had asked the United States to protect him from, had heeded the government’s request that his name be added to the list, and had delivered him to the men who had been waiting at the airport gate.
The more than one hundred Iranian nationals returned across the three flights share the standing the December manifest produced. Some had pending asylum claims. Some had lived in the United States for years. Some had married American citizens and fathered American children. Some had lawful permanent residence that had been revoked by the State Department earlier in the year, the revocation itself an exercise of the sovereign’s plenary discretion over the alien within the territory. None of those facts altered their standing at the gate in Tehran. The removal was the wall operating. The receiving government collected what the United States delivered. The harm that followed in Iran is the consequence the receiving government visits upon its own nationals, exercised according to the standing the returning national carries in the receiving country’s order. The United States returned the men and women whose names had appeared on the manifests. The wall runs between the columns.
The man stands outside the covenant. That is the whole of the judgment, and it does not require the name of the country or the name of the man or the date the email arrived at ICE or the date the plane landed at Imam Khomeini. His presence within the territory was the presence of an alien whose application for protection was pending, and a pending application is not a grant of membership. The household’s protection extends to its members, and the membership the household confers is the membership the sovereign determines. The sovereign determined nothing here in his favor. The man remained an Iranian national whose removal the United States and Iran had agreed upon. The harm that followed the removal is the visible proof the man stood where he had always stood: outside the wall, subject to the jurisdiction of the government he had sought to flee, and his place in the household never anything but the place the sovereign assigned.
Scripture names the boundary in the words spoken at Athens — that God “determined allotted periods and the bounds of their habitation” — and the sovereign who coordinates the receiving government’s identification of which nationals shall be returned acts within the order that assigns each person to the place Providence has fixed. The receiving government had him. The man was returned to the place Providence had assigned him. The household kept him for the years the case required. The household’s keeping did not convert him to a member. The wall runs between the columns. The foreign national stands where the sovereign has placed him, and the sovereign placed him at the gate in Tehran. The ledger is settled.