ICE Emails Show Agency Coordinated With Iranian Government on Deportation Flights, Added Names at Tehran's Request

ICE deported more than 100 Iranian nationals back to Iran last year, and newly released emails show the agency coordinated directly with the Iranian government to do it, including adding three specific names to a flight manifest at Tehran's request.

The documents came out through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the National Iranian American Council. The Intercept first reported on the emails, and Reason later reviewed the same trove.

One email from September 2025 lays it out plainly. An ICE official wrote that the Iranian embassy had just issued passports or travel documents for three people and "requested that they be added to the flight leaving out on the 29th." Other ICE staff then scrambled to pull those three from different detention facilities to make the flight, according to Reason's review of the emails.

For decades, Iranians with final removal orders were often allowed to stay in the U.S. because of well-documented fears of persecution back home. That changed fast in 2025.

The timeline

On June 19, 2025, in the middle of the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran, ICE's then-Acting Executive Associate Director Marcos Charles ordered the deportation of all "removable" Iranians, according to emails reviewed by both Reason and The Intercept. A separate official, name redacted, called it a "WH priority," referring to the White House.

The official noted it would be tough to pull off because regional airspace was closed from the fighting and Iran was "currently uncooperative," per the emails. Three days after Charles' order, President Trump joined Israel's military campaign against Iran.

Within a couple months, Iran got a lot more cooperative. By August 2025, ICE officials were working out flight plans through Qatar, and one redacted email says the plan "started as an Iranian initiative," according to The Intercept's reporting.

The first attempt in August fell apart over coordination problems between Qatari ministries and Iranian counterparts. A second flight got scheduled for September 29, 2025, and that's the one where ICE added the three names Tehran asked for.

The Intercept's reporting adds that then-Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons oversaw the broader operation, which produced at least three charter flights between May and November 2025, each carrying at least a dozen deportees. Some of those deportees were political activists, religious converts, and ethnic minorities, according to The Intercept, and one man told the New York Times he tried to kill himself before the flight and was physically forced onto the plane by ICE agents.

A notable detail buried in the Reason and Intercept coverage: ICE's point of contact for coordinating with Qatar was an ICE attache stationed at the U.S. embassy in Israel, a country that was actively at war with Iran and treats Qatar with deep suspicion. Qatari special forces, the Lekhwiya unit, accompanied Iranian detainees on the flight. The emails also acknowledge ICE deported at least one person by mistake, though the documents reviewed don't specify who or how that error was resolved.

The competing narrative

The Grayzone, reporting separately on a different case detailed in The Nation, points to a family of Iranian legal permanent residents in California, Maryam Tahmasebi and her husband Eissa Hashemi, who were detained by ICE starting April 9, 2025, not for any criminal charge, but reportedly following an online campaign by Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad targeting the family over Hashemi's mother's political history in Iran.

That case and the September deportation flights are not proven to be directly connected in the available reporting. But together they raise a question: was targeting of Iranian nationals in 2025 driven by individualized removal orders and case-by-case review, or by broader political pressure campaigns and White House directives that swept people up regardless of individual circumstances? The emails documenting Charles' June order calling deportations a "WH priority" suggest the latter played a role, at least for the September flights.

None of the reporting here alleges criminal wrongdoing by any named ICE official. No charges have been filed and no investigation into the coordination itself has been announced. What's documented is a policy reversal, ordered from the top, executed with direct input from the same government the U.S. was simultaneously bombing.

The National Iranian American Council's president, Jamal Abdi, told The Intercept the timing wasn't a coincidence: "It seemed clear that Iranians were under the microscope all of a sudden. And we now know that it was actually in the middle of the war where the White House was directing ICE to start removing Iranians."

As of August 2026, the fate of the deportees sent to Tehran remains largely undocumented in public reporting. Whether any face prosecution or worse in Iran, particularly the gay and Christian-convert deportees named in earlier coverage, is an open question nobody in the U.S. government has publicly answered.