Intercept: ICE Coordinated With Iranian Government to Deport 100+ Iranians Across Four Flights, Launched During the Twelve-Day War

The Intercept reported on August 18, 2026 that ICE coordinated with the Iranian government to deport more than 100 Iranian nationals across four flights between September 2025 and January 2026, reversing decades of policy that had blocked removals to Iran on persecution-risk grounds. ICE communicated primarily through Qatari intermediaries at the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but internal emails show direct coordination with Iranian representatives, who requested that specific named individuals be added to deportation manifests: “The Iran Embassy just issued passports or travel documents for the three listed below. They requested they be added to the flight.” The first flight departed September 29–October 1, 2025 with 54 Iranians aboard, against a Qatari expectation of 120; a second transited Kuwait on December 7, 2025; a third on January 25, 2026; a fourth, scheduled for late March, was derailed.

The chronology inverts the intuitive reading. ICE Director Todd Lyons ordered officials to “launch target cases as a priority” and develop deportation plans on June 19, 2025 — during the active Twelve-Day War between the United States, Israel, and Iran — and the removals continued through subsequent bombing campaigns (2026-03-21–us-strikes-natanz-nuclear-facility). The enforcement apparatus was negotiating passenger manifests with a government the United States was bombing. Removal to Iran was long treated as categorically unsafe precisely because the regime persecutes returnees; ICE resolved that by asking the persecuting government to identify who should be on the plane. This extends the pattern of deportation logistics untethered from the conditions at the destination — Ukrainians removed to a war zone via Poland (2026-03-17–ukrainians-deported-war-zone-via-poland), and an ICE director who conceded he did not know which third countries the agency was deporting to (2026-05-05–ice-director-lyons-admits-didnt-know-deportation-countries-existed-third-country-program). The deportation machine’s throughput target is indifferent to whether the receiving state is an adversary, and the adversary is a willing logistics partner.