Los Angeles — U.S. immigration officials worked with Iran to deport Iranians in late 2025 and early 2026, newly released emails show, revealing a working relationship between the U.S. and Iranian governments despite tensions mounting between them.
Hundreds of emails exchanged between U.S. immigration officials, which were obtained by the National Iranian American Council and made public Tuesday, offer the most transparent play-by-play yet of how the two countries worked together to arrange for more than 100 Iranians to be flown back to Iran on three separate immigration flights in September and December 2025 and January 2026.
The emails show that Iranian officials had some influence over which Iranian immigrants in the U.S. were sent back to their home country, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials apparently heeded some last-minute changes to deportation lists that Iran requested.
“Per request from the Iran Embassy I added a few cases,” one unnamed ICE official wrote in late August, a month before the first deportation flight in September. Just over a week later, someone with the same job title moved to make another, unspecified change to the deportation list after they said they met with the “Director at the Iranian Embassy.”
“Iran has requested that I amend the previous manifest and expedite the removal process,” the official wrote.
In a Sept. 26 email, just three days before the deportation flight left U.S. soil, an ICE official said in an email that the Iranian Embassy was still making requests for three additional Iranians on the flight. It’s not clear who ended up on the flight, which wound up being much smaller than initially planned. Iranian officials were still making requests the day the flight departed, although one official wrote that those requests were denied.
Coordination of the flights remained a high priority even as ICE officials acknowledged internally that Iranians were fleeing Iran amid the deadly 12-day war with the U.S. and Israel in June 2025, emails show. The flights departed just months after the U.S. and Israel agreed to a ceasefire with Iran.
The new emails highlight a clear departure from a decades-long practice by the U.S. of welcoming Iranian dissidents, exiles and others since the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced a large number of Iranians to flee.
The deportation of Iranians to a country whose government has a pattern of violent persecution against women, religious minorities and political dissidents has drawn significant criticism from human rights activists.
In a statement provided to CBS News Thursday night, DHS said that the “allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE. ICE works with every country to get travel documents for detainees.”
DHS in its statement said that ICE “removed 54 Iranian citizens on this removal mission including terrorists, human smugglers, and suspected foreign agents. All individuals removed had a final order of removal or an order granting voluntary departure. All individuals were given due process.”
The agency did not clarify the time frame of that removal mission.
Iranian officials acknowledged in September 2025 that as many as 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump administration. They said most of the Iranians had crossed into the U.S. from Mexico illegally, while some faced other immigration issues.
It is not clear from the emails how frequently U.S. immigration officials had direct contact with the Iranian government. Sometimes messages were conveyed through Qatari officials, who helped charter the deportation flights through Doha, but other times officials reference regular meetings with the “Iranian delegation,” the “Director at the Iranian Embassy” and other unnamed Iranian officials.
It is not clear whether the people Iran put on the list had volunteered to repatriate or if they were forced to leave the U.S. Previous reporting from The New York Times revealed that asylum-seekers were among those deported to Iran, while others said they were deported against their will.
At least one person who was deported wasn’t supposed to be, emails showed.
“An Iranian not included on the final manifest we sent to the Qatari MOI was boarded on the flight,” an unnamed U.S. official wrote.
In response, another unnamed U.S. official wrote, “I have no idea how the case/person got through on the plane.”
Emails suggest that pressure to carry out the Iranian deportations came from the highest levels of the Trump administration, even when the U.S. and Israel were exchanging strikes with Iran in a 12-day conflict between June 13 and June 24, 2025.
Just days after a June 16 warning from President Trump on social media that “Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” the former acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, called the repatriation of Iranian immigrants a “priority” in an email sent to the agency’s head of removal operations, Marcos Charles, and a number of unnamed staff.
Shortly after Lyons’ email, Charles forwarded the message to a group of officials whose names are redacted. An unnamed ICE official responded, warning that “removal will prove difficult” amid the ongoing conflict because Iran wasn’t issuing the travel documents for Iranians eligible for deportation. On top of that, the Iranian airspace was closed to all flights during the bombings and Iranians were fleeing the country.
Charles was unfazed, telling staff in a subsequent email to make a plan to deport 58 Iranians with final removal orders in ICE custody at the time.
“We need a plan forward ASAP,” Charles wrote. Another official, whose name was redacted, urged colleagues to “identify a solution for this White House priority.”
Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, said the emails undermine Mr. Trump’s assertions that the U.S. is at war with Iran to save ordinary Iranians from a repressive regime.
“It demonstrates that the top priority here was to kick out as many people as possible by whatever means necessary,” Abdi said.
NIAC Policy Director Ryan Costello said, “These documents expose an operation that demands answers from the highest levels of government.”
On several occasions, the emails show ICE officials arranging for Iranian officials to meet for unspecified reasons with people detained in the U.S., echoing testimony from Iranian asylum-seekers in an unrelated lawsuit filed by an unaffiliated Iranian interest group in July.
Eleven Iranians in immigration detention said they were forced to meet with Iranian government officials while in ICE detention. Those Iranian authorities knew intimate details about their asylum claims, according to the sworn declarations filed in a Washington, D.C., court in July.
The lawsuit alleges that U.S. immigration agencies have been illegally sharing confidential information about Iranian asylum-seekers with the Iranian government.
The U.S. government is allowed to work with government officials of foreign countries to coordinate deportation logistics. However, federal regulations passed in the late 1990s prohibit the government from sharing information that could reveal that the person getting deported applied for asylum.
DHS vehemently disputed the lawsuit’s allegations.
“These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE,” DHS said in a statement in July.
