A lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington accuses the Trump administration of covertly sharing the names and case files of Iranian asylum seekers with the government in Tehran, in an arrangement the suit says allowed Iranian officials to handpick which asylum seekers in American custody would be deported and returned to Iran.
The lawsuit, filed by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and the Public Citizen Litigation Group, names the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as defendants. It alleges the arrangement began in March 2025, when representatives of the State Department met with Iranian diplomats at the Pakistani embassy compound in Washington, a venue used as an intermediary given the absence of formal diplomatic relations between the two countries. At that meeting, the suit alleges, American officials handed over an initial list of at least 150 candidates for deportation.
Since then, according to the complaint, officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement have held monthly in person meetings with Iranian representatives, continuing even after the joint US Israeli campaign against Iran began in February.
The lawsuit alleges the practice violates federal regulations dating to the late 1990s that strictly prohibit disclosing information revealing that a detained individual has applied for asylum, protections put in place because, as one of the plaintiffs' attorneys put it, lives depend on them, and no administration of either party is permitted to set them aside.
The suit is seeking a court order halting the information sharing and the appointment of an independent monitor to prevent further disclosures.
An attorney with Public Citizen said the administration appears more committed to mass deportation than to protecting human lives, even as the country remains at war with Iran.
The Department of Homeland Security has flatly denied the allegations, calling the claim that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government false.
The lawsuit lands against a backdrop that makes the allegations especially fraught. Iranian officials acknowledged last September that as many as 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump administration, and three deportation flights, in September, December, and January, brought dozens of Iranians back to the country, just weeks before the war on Iran began and shortly after the Iranian government had killed thousands of its own citizens in a crackdown on protests. Some of those deported on those flights were themselves asylum seekers, according to earlier reporting.
Roughly 600 Iranians were held in immigration detention over the past year, according to public records obtained by the National Iranian American Council. In a separate case last month, an Iranian woman was among a group of migrants the United States deported to the Central African Republic, a marked departure from decades of American practice welcoming Iranian dissidents and exiles fleeing the regime since the 1979 revolution.
If the allegations hold up, the case raises a difficult question, whether the same government waging war against the Iranian regime has simultaneously been feeding that regime the names of people who fled it.
