Washington, DC – The National Iranian American Council has obtained a new batch of FOIA documents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showing the agency’s efforts to surge detentions and deportations of Iranian nationals amid the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. NIAC uncovered this via a FOIA request and our current legal action against ICE, supported by Red Eagle Law, LLC.
“As Israel and the U.S. were dropping bombs on Iran and the President was warning Iranians to evacuate major cities, ICE in Tel Aviv was coordinating a mass deportation operation to force vulnerable Iranians in the U.S. back to the country being bombed,” said Jamal Abdi, President of the National Iranian American Council. “The same Administration that would later promise Iranians ‘help is on the way’ was working to accelerate deportations of asylum seekers back to Iran, even as officials acknowledged that Iran’s airspace was closed and people were desperately trying to flee the country.”
There are numerous revelations throughout the email chains released via the FOIA, including:
- The emails reveal planning for the two deportation flights that took place in 2025, and there were many logistical hurdles. Some documents reveal that individuals opposed return, or court orders prevented their removal to Iran, or that individuals typically didn’t secure Iranian passports as they didn’t want to return to the country.
- The order to deport Iranians came directly from the White House during the June 2025 war, per internal ICE emails, leading to acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and other senior ICE officials prioritizing Iranian removals, which eventually culminated in the September 2025 flight. It also corresponds with a major surge in arrests of Iranians, as disclosed in earlier data obtained through the NIAC FOIA. Following the emails from Todd Lyons and other senior ICE officials on June 19, 2026 – three days before the U.S. entered the war against Iran – the Trump administration proceeded to arrest 192 Iranians across the country before the end of the month in an unprecedented surge, per data disclosed in the earlier FOIA release. The prioritization of Iranian deportations led ICE officials to note that Iran’s airspace was closed and that people were trying to flee across the border out of Iran. ICE considered their options regardless, and accelerated their deportation plans, as it was a priority from the White House.
- An ICE attaché for Enforcement and Removal Operations stationed in the U.S. Embassy Branch Office in Tel Aviv was one of if not the most heavily-involved officials coordinating the deportation of Iranian nationals back to Iran. Very little information exists in the public sphere on why ICE maintains a footprint in Israel, whether ICE is well positioned to resist any efforts by the Israeli government to influence ICE operations and targeting or why it was looped into efforts to deport Iranians back to Iran, particularly given that the flight was never scheduled to stop in Israel.
- There was extensive coordination between at least one ICE official and the Iranian Interests section at the Pakistani embassy, with ICE facilitating field visits for the Director of the Interests Section to meet with detainees. The Interests Section Director sought to get additional individuals added to the first deportation flight, citing humanitarian reasons.
- ICE put an Iranian national on the September 30, 2025 deportation flight who was not on the manifest. This appears to have been discovered when the plane offloaded Iranian nationals in Qatar prior to their final flight to Iran. The individual wrongly deported was repatriated to Iran, following Qatari communication with the Iranian Embassy in Doha. No further identifying details are available, but earlier reporting established that several Iranian nationals strenuously resisted being loaded onto the deportation flight.
- The flight may have included two individuals previously detained at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. One internal email on the manifest states “There are two GITMO cases, one ready to go the is 212f.” 212f refers to the President’s authorities to deny entry into the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act. On board the flight with the Iranian nationals in September 2025 was a group of Egyptians and Russians. The nationality of the individuals who may have been detained at Guantanamo Bay, and then put on board the deportation flight, is unclear. Various logistical emails reference a role for Lekhwiya, Qatari special forces for internal security.
“These documents expose an operation that demands answers from the highest levels of government,” said NIAC Policy Director Ryan Costello. “ICE somehow deported an Iranian who was not even on the flight manifest, an extraordinary breakdown that raises serious questions about unlawful or involuntary cross-border transfer. Its office in Tel Aviv was deeply involved in coordinating deportations of Iranians from the United States, despite the flight never being scheduled to stop in Israel. And all of this traces back to a White House directive issued as war was engulfing Iran.”
“The U.S. government cannot claim to stand with the Iranian people while bombing their country, arresting Iranians here at home, and forcing people back into the danger it helped create,” said Abdi. “We need to know who was wrongly put on that plane, why ICE’s Tel Aviv office was so deeply involved, and exactly what the White House ordered. NIAC is committed to dragging these facts into the light and fighting to ensure Iranians are not treated as disposable collateral of U.S. foreign and immigration policy.”
This is the second major batch of records NIAC has obtained from ICE through our FOIA request and lawsuit, filed in November 2025 after ICE failed to respond to NIAC’s original FOIA request within the legally required window. The first batch of records, released earlier, showed a major surge of arrests after the June 2025 war against Iran, and that ICE had detained at least 577 Iranian nationals nationwide.
In addition to shedding light on ICE policy toward Iranian nationals via FOIA request, NIAC maintains an ICE Detention Tracker, a community resource NIAC maintains to document detentions and deportations of Iranian nationals as ICE and the government withhold the full scope of who is being held and removed.
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