Unsealed Thursday: the Trump Administration Held Talks With Iran on Deporting Iranians Even as the War Dragged On
Court documents unsealed on Thursday, obtained by the Associated Press, show the administration kept working with Iranian officials on travel documents and removal routes during the war — and that a federal judge has now ordered the government to give the court advance notice before any Iranian is deported anywhere.
The United States negotiated with Iran about deporting Iranians while the two countries were at war. Court documents unsealed on Thursday and obtained by the Associated Press show that the Trump administration maintained contacts with Iranian officials during the war specifically for submitting travel documents and figuring out, in the filings' words, 'possible avenues for removal.' As recently as mid-October, the administration told the court it had plans to deport Iranians through an unnamed third country, although it did not specify when that would be carried out.
The disclosures come from a lawsuit brought by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund, which alleges that the administration's immigration agencies shared confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with the Iranian government, violating immigration regulations and endangering the people who sought protection. The Department of Homeland Security has denied sharing asylum records. The legal group said on Thursday that at least a dozen Iranian detainees had been notified over the past week that they were being deported to Iran — some told it could happen as soon as this coming Sunday — after being contacted by the Iranian Interest Section, the Iranian representative office inside the Pakistani Embassy in Washington that handles consular affairs, about a deportation flight to Iran routed through Pakistan.
The judge in the case has now put the government on a clock. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ordered officials to give the court 24 hours' notice of any finalized plan to deport Iranians to Iran or to any other country, and five days' written notice before any such deportation is carried out. At an October 15 hearing, according to the transcript the AP quoted, Reyes pressed the government on what return would mean, saying the deportees would face, 'at a minimum, a serious threat of certain death' in a country the president himself has described as lawless. The Justice Department's attorney, Dimitar Georgiev-Remmel, answered that the government is executing lawful orders of removal, and told the court no specific date had been set to carry any of them out.
Earlier court filings and emails, the AP reported, show the deportation talks with Iran also took place last year and again shortly before the war began — a channel between Washington and Tehran that outlasted the outbreak of fighting. What the unsealed documents establish is narrower and stranger than a deal: while the war was being fought, the machinery of removal kept turning, travel documents kept moving, and a federal judge has now required that the next step, whenever it comes, be announced to her court before it is taken.
