A lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., accuses the Trump administration’s immigration agencies of illegally turning over confidential details about Iranian asylum seekers to the Iranian government — a move the plaintiffs say violates federal law and puts lives in serious danger.
The complaint, brought by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and the Public Citizen Litigation Group, describes a coordinated effort between U.S. and Iranian officials to identify Iranians held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and pressure them to return to Iran. Legal observers note this represents a dramatic break from the decades of diplomatic hostility between the two nations, especially given an ongoing war between them.
Public records obtained by the National Iranian American Council show that roughly 600 Iranians were placed in immigration detention last year. In June, one Iranian woman was among approximately two dozen migrants the U.S. sent to the Central African Republic — a sharp departure from a longstanding American tradition of welcoming Iranian dissidents, exiles, and refugees that dates back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
While U.S. law does permit the government to coordinate with foreign officials on deportation logistics, federal regulations enacted in the late 1990s specifically bar the government from sharing any information that could reveal whether a person being deported had applied for asylum.
“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.
According to the lawsuit, beginning in March 2025, the U.S. State Department arranged monthly meetings with Iranian officials through the Pakistani embassy, which served as an intermediary. During those meetings, U.S. officials reportedly handed over detailed, sensitive information about detained Iranian immigrants they were seeking to deport.
The shared information reportedly included details from asylum applications filed by individuals who said they had been persecuted for converting to Christianity, for their sexual orientation, or for participating in the Women, Life, Freedom protests against the Iranian government in 2022. The lawsuit states that ICE compelled Iranian asylum applicants held at various detention facilities — primarily in southern states — to meet face-to-face with an Iranian government official who already had extensive, specific knowledge of their applications. The complaint notes this continued even after joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran triggered the Iran war in February 2026.
“Despite the U.S.’s ongoing war with Iran, the administration seems more committed to mass deportation than protecting human lives,” said Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney at the Public Citizen Litigation Group.
The lawsuit names the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, and the Department of State as defendants. Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the State Department responded to requests for comment by Tuesday morning.
The filing comes as the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive immigration enforcement campaign that, according to a DHS announcement, resulted in more than 600,000 deportations and prompted roughly 1.9 million immigrants to voluntarily leave the country in 2025 alone.
Iranian officials acknowledged in September 2025 that as many as 400 Iranians could be returned to Iran under an agreement with the Trump administration. That same month, the first of three deportation flights carried dozens of Iranians back to the country. A second flight followed in December 2025, and a third departed at the end of January 2026 — about a month before the war with Iran began and just weeks after the Iranian government killed thousands of its own citizens during a violent crackdown on protests. The New York Times reported at the time that some of those deported on those flights were asylum seekers.
The lawsuit is asking the court to halt any further sharing of asylum seekers’ information with the Iranian government and to appoint an independent monitor to ensure the practice does not continue.
