WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has quietly given another charter flight the go-ahead to bring back to their home country 55 Iranian nationals who are in U.S. immigration detention, even as Iran says the plane will land “in the coming days.” That operation was part of a larger spike in U.S. deportations to Iran under President Donald Trump’s effort to crack down on immigration, which advocates say is denying asylum seekers meaningful review, Dec. 8, 2025.
Iran’s foreign ministry said Sunday that 55 were being deported on the current flight, in what Reuters reported is already at least the second charter carrying deportees since September, when 120 Iranians were flown to Tehran after a stopover in Doha, Qatar. Rights groups say the U.S. deportations to Iran are occurring in a veil of secrecy that might be transporting around 400 people outside the country with scant public information about who is put onto planes and what they face on return, according to patterns first identified in reporting by The Washington Post earlier this year.
The deportations, said Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, are based on “political reasons” and run afoul of international law even as Tehran acquiesces in accepting its citizens. In September, a charter flight left a Louisiana detention centre unlocked in an initiative previously undisclosed by Washington and Tehran that carried 120 Iranians directly onwards to the Iranian capital of Tehran, data from flight-trackers and a Reuters investigation revealed. Deportees and lawyers quoted by The Times of Israel say some of the passengers are dissidents and religious converts who claim they were shackled or forced onto the plane, raising questions about whether these counter-refoulement measures are met under U.S. deportations to Iran.
Increasing U.S. deportations to Iran face legal and moral questions.
The flights to and from Iran became an option just as the Trump administration was setting records for deportation flights around the world, including to countries roiled by conflict and with dismal human rights records, according to an analysis by Human Rights First tracking immigration enforcement flights. They say the same machinery now being used to deport people from the United States to Iran was constructed with little transparency, from sealed charter contracts to scant reporting of where individuals are taken and why.
Civil liberties lawyers note that the Iran flights are on top of a Trump order blocking most new immigration applications from 19 “high-risk” countries — including Iran — and requiring individualised security reviews of applicants who entered the United States during the previous administration. Taken together, they say, the measures form a system in which Iranians and those from other targeted nationalities encounter closed doors at the border and expedited expulsions once inside.
U.S.-based advocacy organisations argue that the latest U.S. deportations to Iran revive a danger that for years manifested itself in a different guise: wide-reaching travel bans that cleaved visas, families and left students and researchers stranded abroad, as documented in 2019 research by the Migration Policy Institute. In the period before these flights, visa approvals for Iranian citizens had plummeted under travel restrictions adopted by the Trump administration — and legal advocates cautioned in a 2020 explainer from the American Immigration Council that those rules could set the stage for more aggressive enforcement.
To many members of the Iranian diaspora, the new charter flights represent the culmination of that shift, with lawyers racing to file emergency motions while detainees are rushed through detention centres near major airports and relatives in the United States clamour for any information on loved ones who appear on deportation lists. Whether the courts and Congress can slow U.S. deportations to Iran — or force greater transparency on who is being returned, and why — may help decide how many more planes follow.
