The lawsuit says US immigration agencies illegally shared confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with Iran

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that Trump administration immigration agencies were sharing confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with the Iranian government, violating national immigration regulations and putting countless Iranians at risk, court filings say.

The lawsuit depicts a coordinated campaign between the U.S. and Iranian governments to identify Iranians in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and pressure them to return to Iran — a marked departure from decades of diplomatic animosity between the two governments and ongoing war. The Department of Homeland Security has denied that it shares asylum application records with the Iranian government.

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Nearly 600 Iranians were placed in immigration detention centers last year, according to public records obtained by the National Iranian American Council. In June, an Iranian woman was among two dozen migrants deported by the United States to the Central African Republic — a marked departure from a decades-long practice by the United States of welcoming Iranian dissidents, exiles, and others since the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced a large number of Iranians to flee.

The U.S. government is permitted to work with government officials in foreign countries to coordinate deportation logistics. However, federal regulations passed in the late 1990s prohibit the government from sharing information that could reveal that a deported person has applied for asylum.

“Congress made these confidentiality protections mandatory precisely because lives depend on them, and no agency or administration of either party should set them aside,” said Ali Rahnama, interim executive director of the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund.

Beginning in March 2025, the US State Department arranged monthly meetings with Iranian officials, using the Pakistani Embassy as an intermediary, where US officials shared detailed and sensitive information about detained Iranian immigrants whom the US government hoped to deport, lawyers for the American Iranian Legal Defense Fund and the Public Citizen Litigation Group wrote in a complaint.

The information included details about asylum claims filed by people who say they were persecuted for converting to Christianity, for their sexuality, or for participating in Women, Life, and Liberty protests against the Iranian government in 2022, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

ICE forced Iranian asylum seekers who were detained in numerous facilities, mostly in southern states, to meet with an Iranian government official with extensive and specific knowledge of their claims, according to the complaint. The information was shared even after joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran started the Iran War in February 2026.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Tuesday that ICE is working to obtain travel documents for detainees in its custody, and that the agency is facilitating “consular access to detained individuals, in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and agency policy.”

“These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are false,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

The lawsuit seeks to stop the exchange of information about asylum seekers with the Iranian government and appoint an independent monitor to prevent its disclosure in the future.

“Despite the United States’ ongoing war with Iran, the administration appears more committed to mass deportations than protecting human lives,” Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group, said in a statement.

The complaint names the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullen, and the State Department as some of the defendants.

The allegations come amid President Donald Trump’s ambitious and aggressive anti-immigration campaign that has included the deportation of more than 600,000 people and caused nearly 1.9 million immigrants to voluntarily leave in 2025 alone, according to an announcement from the Department of Homeland Security.

Iranian officials acknowledged in September 2025 that up to 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump administration. That month, the first of three deportation flights returned dozens of Iranians to Iran. The second deportation flight was in December 2025, and the last recorded deportation flight departed at the end of January 2026, roughly a month before the start of the war on Iran, and just weeks after the Iranian government killed thousands of citizens as part of a brutal crackdown on protests. The New York Times reported at the time that some of those deported on the flights in September, December and January were asylum seekers.

Associated Press correspondent Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.