A lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that the Trump administration's immigration agencies have shared confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with the Iranian government, a practice that violates national immigration regulations and endangers Iranians, according to court filings.
The legal complaint depicts a coordinated effort between the U.S. and Iranian governments to identify Iranians in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and pressure them to return to Iran, a move that marks a significant departure from decades of diplomatic hostility and an ongoing conflict between the two nations.
Approximately 600 Iranians were detained by immigration authorities last year, according to public records. In June of an unspecified year, an Iranian woman was among dozens of migrants deported to the Central African Republic, a departure from the long-standing U.S. practice of accepting Iranian dissidents and exiles following the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Federal regulations enacted in the late 1990s prohibit the U.S. government from sharing information that could reveal an individual's asylum application status when coordinating deportation logistics with foreign countries, although working with foreign officials on deportation logistics is permissible. "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, the interim executive director of the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund.
The lawsuit states that beginning in March 2025, U.S. State Department officials arranged monthly meetings with Iranian officials, using the Pakistani embassy as an intermediary. During these meetings, U.S. officials reportedly shared detailed, sensitive information about detained Iranian immigrants whom the U.S. government sought to deport. The information allegedly included details about asylum applications from individuals fleeing persecution based on their conversion to Christianity, their sexuality, or their participation in the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests against the Iranian government.
According to the complaint, ICE forced Iranian asylum applicants detained in various facilities, primarily in southern states, to meet with an Iranian government official who possessed specific knowledge of their asylum applications. These disclosures reportedly occurred even after joint U.S.-Israeli strikes initiated an "Iran war" in February 2026.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and the Public Citizen Litigation Group, seeks to halt the sharing of asylum seeker information with the Iranian government and to appoint an independent monitor to prevent future disclosures. "Despite the U.S.’s ongoing war with Iran, the administration seems more committed to mass deportation than protecting human lives," stated Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group.
Defendants named in the complaint include the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, and the Department of State. The Department of Homeland Security and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
These allegations surface amid an aggressive immigration crackdown under President Donald Trump, which the Department of Homeland Security announced involved over 600,000 deportations and prompted approximately 1.9 million immigrants to leave the country voluntarily in 2025 alone.
Iranian officials acknowledged in September 2025 that as many as 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump administration. That month, the first of three deportation flights returned dozens of Iranians to Iran. A second flight occurred in December 2025, and the final recorded flight departed at the end of January 2026. This last flight departed roughly a month before the commencement of the "war on Iran" and mere weeks after the Iranian government's crackdown on protests resulted in thousands of deaths. Reports indicated that some individuals deported in September, December, and January were asylum seekers.