Leaked ICE Emails Reveal Secret Backchannel Partnership With Iran To Alter US Deportation Flight Manifests

Hundreds of internal emails released this week show that Iranian officials had a hand in deciding which Iranians the United States deported, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting on last-minute requests from Tehran to add names to its removal lists.

The documents, obtained by the National Iranian American Council and made public on Tuesday, offer the clearest account yet of the quiet coordination that put more than 100 Iranians on three deportation flights home, even as the two governments were trading missile strikes.

The correspondence, exchanged among US immigration officials and first reported by the Associated Press, does not describe a conspiracy so much as an uncomfortable working relationship, one in which a country the Trump administration was bombing was also being consulted on the paperwork of who got sent back to it.

It shows Iran exerting influence over the manifests, ICE accommodating some of those demands, and the deportations being pushed as a priority from the top of the administration, all against the backdrop of open military conflict.

What the Emails Show

The central revelation is that Iran had input into the lists. According to the AP, which reviewed the emails, ICE officials heeded some eleventh-hour changes at Tehran's request, with one unnamed official writing in late August, 'Per request from the Iran Embassy I added a few cases,' a month before the first flight departed in September.

The flights carried more than 100 Iranians home in September and December 2025 and January 2026. Just over a week after the first email, an official with the same job title moved to make another change to the deportation list after meeting an unnamed director, one of several exchanges in which Iranian preferences appear to have shaped who was and was not aboard.

Not every change was intended. In one exchange, a US official flagged that 'an Iranian not included on the final manifest we sent to the Qatari MOI was boarded on the flight', to which a colleague replied, 'I have no idea how the case/person got through on the plane.'

The confusion cuts against any picture of a smoothly run scheme, pointing instead to a process improvised under pressure, with Qatar acting as an intermediary for flights between two governments with no formal diplomatic ties.

Pressure From the Top, Even amid the Strikes

The emails place the push for these deportations at the highest levels of the administration, and at a remarkable moment. The removals were treated as urgent even during the 12-day conflict between 13 and 24 June 2025, when the United States and Israel were exchanging strikes with Iran.

Days after President Donald Trump warned on social media on 16 June that 'Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran,' the then acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, called the repatriation of Iranian immigrants a 'priority' in an email to the agency's head of removal operations, Marcos Charles, and other staff.

Charles forwarded the message to a group of officials whose names were redacted, and the flights went ahead in the months that followed.

That timing is the sharpest edge of the story. An administration publicly threatening Tehran was, in private, working with Iranian officials to arrange the return of Iranian nationals, a contradiction that the emails lay bare without resolving.

Deportations to any country require the receiving government's cooperation, but rarely is that cooperation documented alongside active hostilities.

Why the Disclosure Matters

The coordination touches people with real stakes in the outcome. Advocates have raised concerns that some of those returned could face danger in Iran, and that allowing a foreign government to influence a deportation list hands that government a say over the fate of its own nationals, including potential dissidents, who sought to stay in the United States.

The National Iranian American Council, which obtained the emails through public-records requests and released them, has pressed for scrutiny of how the flights were arranged and who ultimately decided the manifests.

The group's disclosure is the reason any of this is public, and it frames the correspondence as evidence that immigration enforcement was being conducted hand in glove with a hostile power.

Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security has offered a detailed public account of the exchanges, and questions remain about how many people were affected by Iran's requests and on what basis names were added or removed.

What the documents establish is narrower but significant: that behind the public posture of confrontation, the machinery of deportation kept running on quiet cooperation with Tehran.