Lawsuit Claims State Department Shared Iranian Asylum Seekers' Files With Iran Since March 2025

A federal lawsuit filed Tuesday accuses the State Department and Department of Homeland Security of illegally sharing Iranian asylum seekers' confidential immigration files with the Iranian government.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and the Public Citizen Litigation Group, names Secretary of State Marco Rubio and seeks an emergency preliminary injunction. It's captioned Iranian American Legal Defense Fund v. Rubio.

According to the complaint, the arrangement started in March 2025. U.S. officials allegedly held monthly meetings with Iranian government representatives, using the Pakistani embassy as a go-between, according to PBS. In those meetings, the lawsuit claims, U.S. officials shared detailed information about Iranian immigrants detained by ICE who the administration hoped to deport.

The alleged information wasn't limited to identity and travel documents. According to the complaint, it included details from asylum applications filed by people who said they fled Iran after converting to Christianity, because of their sexuality, or for taking part in the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests against the Iranian government, PBS reported.

The lawsuit further alleges ICE forced detained Iranian asylum seekers, held mostly in facilities in southern states, to meet face-to-face with an Iranian government official who already had specific knowledge of their asylum claims, according to Courthouse News Service.

The law is not ambiguous here

Federal regulations from the late 1990s bar the government from disclosing anything that would reveal a person applied for asylum. That protection exists because asylum seekers are, by definition, people who say a foreign government wants to hurt them.

"Congress made these confidentiality protections mandatory precisely because lives depend on them, and no agency and no administration, of either party, may set them aside," said Ali Rahnama, interim executive director of the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund, according to PBS.

These rules were built to survive changes in who's in the White House. If the allegations are accurate, this isn't a policy disagreement. It's a bypass of a legal firewall Congress put there for a reason.

DHS says it's not what it looks like

DHS denies sharing asylum application records with Iran. A DHS spokesperson told Courthouse News that "ICE meets and works to get travel documents for detainees with every country" and that ICE simply facilitates standard consular access, "consistent with established protocols" and "applicable laws, regulations and agency policy."

The U.S. government is allowed to coordinate with foreign governments to get travel documents and confirm identity for people being deported. Every administration does this with dozens of countries. Consular notification is a normal, legal process.

The dispute here is whether the administration crossed the line from routine consular coordination into handing over the substance of asylum claims, the specific reasons people said they fled. That's the line the 1990s regulations were built to prevent crossing, and it's the central factual question the lawsuit puts before U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes.

What's proven and what's alleged

No court has ruled on these claims yet. The complaint's specifics, the March 2025 meetings, the Pakistani embassy intermediary, the detail level shared, come from the plaintiffs' filing and have not been independently verified in court. DHS disputes the core allegation outright.

The timing context matters too. According to Courthouse News, the lawsuit alleges this information-sharing continued through the U.S. military's June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Iran's crackdown on protesters in January 2026, and the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that the suit says began Feb. 28, 2026. If accurate, that means the alleged sharing persisted even as the two countries were engaged in open hostilities, not just diplomatic friction.

Roughly 600 Iranians were held in immigration detention over the past year, according to public records obtained by the National Iranian American Council and cited by PBS. In June, an Iranian woman was among roughly two dozen migrants the U.S. deported to the Central African Republic, a striking break from decades of U.S. policy generally welcoming Iranian dissidents and religious minorities since the 1979 revolution.

What the lawsuit is asking for

The plaintiffs want Judge Reyes, a Biden appointee, to block any further disclosures to Iran and to appoint a special master to review which asylum files may already have been compromised, according to Courthouse News. They also argue the practice violates the UN Convention Against Torture, which bars deporting people to a country where they'd likely face persecution or torture, even when deportation itself is otherwise lawful.

The next step is procedural. The court has to rule on the preliminary injunction motion filed by the Public Citizen Litigation Group. Until then, the central fact question—whether U.S. officials actually handed Iran the substance of these asylum claims or merely coordinated routine travel documents—remains contested between the plaintiffs' filing and DHS's on-record denial.