A new federal lawsuit alleges that the Trump administration has been secretly coordinating with the Iranian government to fast-track the deportation of Iranian asylum seekers — sharing sensitive personal information about dissidents with the very regime they fled, even as the United States wages active war against Iran.
The suit, filed earlier this month by the Public Citizen Litigation Group and the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), claims that since March 2025, U.S. officials have been transmitting detailed case files on detained Iranian immigrants to Iranian regime representatives, arranging face-to-face meetings between those officials and asylum seekers held in American detention facilities, and continuing to pass along document packages even after joint U.S.-Israeli strikes triggered an open military conflict with Iran in February 2026.
The people caught in this process are not ordinary immigration cases. They include Christian converts, participants in Iran’s 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests, and 2SLGBTQ+ individuals — precisely the categories of people the Iranian government has imprisoned, tortured, and executed.
The lawsuit includes eleven sworn statements from Iranian nationals currently held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. One woman described waiting at an Arizona detention facility for her asylum claim to be processed when she and other Iranian detainees were escorted into a room to meet with a man ICE agents identified as an Iranian consular official. That official, the lawsuit alleges, arrived with specific and detailed knowledge of the detainees’ asylum applications — knowledge that could only have come from U.S. government records.
According to the complaint, the State Department arranged monthly meetings with Iranian officials through the Pakistani Embassy beginning in March 2025, at which U.S. officials provided information about detained Iranians the government sought to deport. Those meetings were followed, the lawsuit says, by several mass deportation flights to Iran.
Immigration attorney Cyrus Mehri, speaking with CBC Radio’s As It Happens, said he directly asked a government official whether any safety protocols or assurances had been secured for Women, Life, Freedom protesters or pro-democracy activists facing deportation. The answer was no. No protective procedures existed for Christian or 2SLGBTQ+ Iranians either, he said.
“Don’t forget, we’re at war with Iran,” Mehri said. “Why are we turning over asylum seekers to Iran on a silver platter?”
The meetings between Iranian officials and detained asylum seekers reportedly stopped before hostilities broke out on February 28, 2026. But the lawsuit alleges that ICE has continued to mail or hand-deliver document packages to the Iranian Interests Section even as the conflict continues. The information kept flowing after the bombs started falling.
The suit names Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, and acting ICE Director David Venturella, along with their respective agencies, as defendants. It asks a court to halt any further sharing of asylum seekers’ information with the Iranian government and to appoint an independent monitor to prevent future disclosures.
The scale of the issue is not trivial. Public records obtained by the National Iranian American Council show that roughly 600 Iranians were placed in immigration detention in the past year alone.
The Department of Homeland Security denied the core allegations. “These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE,” a DHS spokesperson told CBC by email, adding that “ICE is committed to ensuring that illegal aliens are informed of their right to communicate with their country’s consular officials.”
That response has done little to satisfy the plaintiffs. “Despite the U.S.’s ongoing war with Iran, the administration seems more committed to mass deportation than protecting human lives,” said Michael Kirkpatrick, attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group. The case is now before the courts.
