An administration that calls a foreign government a death machine quietly hands its passport to that same government's agents and books a seat for a dozen of its dissidents.

"Iran has requested that I amend the previous manifest an expedite the removal process."

(ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officer, August 29, 2025, in emails obtained by The Intercept from a National Iranian American Council FOIA request)

The phrase "maximum pressure" has a sound to it. In Trump's February 2025 national security memo it landed on the page with the full weight of a government that, six months later, would be dropping ordnance on residential neighborhoods in Tabriz. "Iran commits grievous human rights abuses and arbitrarily detains foreigners, including United States citizens, on spurious charges," the memo read. The same administration that wrote that sentence spent the following year figuring out how to get 522 Iranian nationals out of the country and into the hands of the government the memo was describing.

The emails, obtained by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) through FOIA and handed to The Intercept, cover roughly a six-month window, from May 2025 to November 2025, and they document the planning and execution of at least three charter flights that landed in Tehran carrying Iranian deportees. The first left Alexandria, Louisiana, on September 29. It stopped in Puerto Rico, then Cairo, then Doha. Fifty-four Iranians were on board when it made the final leg on a Qatar Airways charter into Imam Khomeini International Airport on October 1.

The coordination was, by the standards of two countries without diplomatic relations since 1979, almost casual. An ICE attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, identified in the emails as Joshua Coster, was running the logistics: landing permits, passenger manifests, the handoff in Doha to the Qatari state carrier. His email signature identified him as the ERO attaché. He was doing the work through the Qatari government, which was itself doing the work on behalf of the Iranian government.

What the emails reveal that is harder to explain away than the paperwork is the sequence. The twelve-day war between Israel and Iran ended on June 24, 2025. On June 19, while the conflict was still going, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons sent an order from his BlackBerry: "launch target cases as a priority." Within an hour, his head of removal operations, Marcos Charles, was telling his staff, "Please begin working on a plan to remove all removable FO Iranians in custody. We need a plan forward ASAP."

An assistant director, name redacted in the release, sounded out a warning. "Iran is currently uncooperative and does not issue travel documents in a timely manner," he wrote. "Removal will prove difficult." Within 24 hours he was being told to press on anyway.

That is not a policy decision made in a quiet room. That is a war cabinet and a detention center pointing at the same map and agreeing on what to do with the people on it.

One of the most damning details in the emails is not a grand gesture but a slip. Coster wrote on September 30, 2025, that an Iranian national who was not on the final manifest had somehow been put on the plane to Doha. "An Iranian national not included on the final manifest we sent to Qatari MOI was boarded on the flight," he wrote. "This is unfortunate."

The passenger flew to Iran anyway.

Translation: the manifest the government was sending to Tehran was treated by the government as something to be amended on request, and the person who should not have been on it was, in the eyes of the state, a clerical error worth correcting.

The emails also show the Iranian government asking for specific people. Three individuals, by name, were flagged for inclusion on the September flight. "The Iran Embassy just issued passports or travel documents for the three listed below," one official wrote on September 26. "They requested they be added to the flight leaving out on the 29th."

The New York Times reported last year on at least one man who had attempted suicide before the flight and was physically placed on the plane by ICE agents. The emails do not name him. They do, however, show a process in which the government's own caseworkers flagged, in plain language, that they were handing specific people to a government with a public record that would make most of them disappear.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has declined to address the apparent mix-up or the specific requests from Iranian officials. A DHS spokesperson called the lawsuit filed by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund in federal court last month "hearsay" and denied that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government. The lawsuit, which the emails appear to corroborate, alleges exactly that.

Hassan Ahmad, an immigration attorney who has represented several of the people named in the emails, put the situation plainly: "It seems that this administration will stop at nothing to make sure that these physical deportations actually happen, no matter what the cost, and they'll just turn people over to despotic regimes. I've been an immigration lawyer a long time, but with this administration, every day it's a new low."

Between June and July 2025, ICE detained between 290 and 300 Iranian nationals who had not already been in custody. In June, Charles tallied 522 Iranians in ICE detention, 244 of them under a final order of removal. His internal portal showed more than 5,000 other Iranians in deportation proceedings who were not yet in custody. The numbers are the policy. The numbers are the memo. The numbers are the plane.

Jamal Abdi, president of NIAC, said the reversal in decades of practice was the point. For decades, Iranian nationals in the United States, even those with a final removal order, were typically allowed to remain, because the U.S. had no functioning channel to get them out of the country and because sending them back was, in a legal sense, a death sentence. That protection disappeared the moment the U.S. decided it wanted the flights to happen.

The second flight went out on December 7, 2025, through Kuwait. A third followed on January 25. A fourth was scheduled for late March. The emails end before that fourth flight. The bombs started falling in late February, and the flight was, according to court filings, canceled.

That is the entire logic of the story, compressed into a single sentence: the deportations stopped not because the administration decided the people were worth keeping, but because the country they were being sent to was, at that moment, on fire.

The question is not whether this was corrupt. The question is why anyone was surprised.