The Trump administration deported a planeload of Iranian citizens on a chartered plane to Iran on Sunday, according to two Iranian officials familiar with the details, in just the second time the United States has ever done so.
The plane — carrying about 50 Iranian citizens, as well as deportees from Arab countries and Russia — departed from an airport in Mesa, Arizona, and will make stops in Egypt and Kuwait, said the two Iranian officials, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The U.S.-chartered deportation flight to Iran was the second of its kind, after the first took off in September, after months of negotiations between Tehran and Washington.
Iran and the United States have not had diplomatic relations since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and for decades the United States has provided refuge to Iranian dissidents, religious and ethnic minorities; members of the LGBTQ+ community; and others fleeing persecution in their homeland.
But as part of the Trump administration’s pursuit of mass deportations, it reached a deal with Tehran to coordinate the return of Iranian citizens facing deportation — currently estimated at about 2,000 people — and send them on chartered planes to Tehran. In the past, the United States deported Iranians individually on commercial planes.
The identities of Sunday’s deportees and their individual circumstances — including whether they had voluntarily accepted deportation or had been forced onto the plane — were not immediately clear. One of the Iranian officials familiar with the list of Iranians on the flight said they had entered the United States through the southern border, lingered in detention facilities for months and had their asylum requests denied.
The Department of Homeland Security did not comment on the flight. A U.S. official, who asked not to be identified to discuss the issue, confirmed the flight had taken off Sunday and described it as a routine deportation flight that included nationals from other countries, not just Iran.
One of the Iranian officials, who has worked closely with U.S. officials on the transfer, said that Arab and Russian nationals would get off the plane when it landed in Cairo and that the Iranians would then travel on to Kuwait, where they would transfer to a chartered Kuwait Airways airplane for the final leg to Tehran.
Mojtaba Shasti Karimi, director of consular services for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, told local news media Sunday that Iran was expecting to receive about 55 deportees from the United States in the coming days.
Shasti Karimi said that those in the group had expressed their willingness to return home to Iran because of “the racist and anti-immigration policies,” of the U.S. government and said Tehran had received reports of “inhumane” treatment of Iranians held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
As news reports of the possible flight began to circulate over the weekend, however, an Iranian-American U.S. lawmaker, Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., warned on social media that the flight could include “vulnerable individuals who could face persecution” if returned to Iran.
The Trump administration has said it plans to carry out the largest deportation in the country’s history, targeting immigrants lacking legal status and those who had illegally crossed the U.S. border. The administration has also said that it would severely reduce the number of asylum cases it grants and limit them to white migrants from South Africa or English-speaking Europeans.
Iranians are among the citizens of 19 countries targeted in President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Their — and many others’ — legal pathways to immigration have also been restricted following new limits Trump announced after the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington last month. The suspect in the shooting, which killed one soldier, is an immigrant from Afghanistan.
The first flight of Iranian deportees departed in September and landed in Tehran in early October, by way of Qatar, and at least eight of 45 people on the flight said they had resisted deportation, begging to not be sent to Iran because they feared for their lives. Two deportees on the flight to Tehran recounted their ordeals in detail, saying they had been beaten by immigration officials in the United States and in Qatar and dragged onto the plane.
Upon landing in Tehran in October, deportees said they were terrified, as they were questioned at the airport and made to fill out forms explaining why they had left Iran and sought asylum in America. Several of the deportees said they had been called in for interrogation by the intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guard.
The United States and Qatar both denied allegations of violence against the deportees or forcing them on the flights to Iran.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
