Trump Admin Allegedly Mailed Iranian Asylum Files Straight to Tehran

What the Lawsuit Actually Says

The suit was filed by the Public Citizen Litigation Group on behalf of the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund, and the allegations inside it are stomach-turning. According to NPR, U.S. government officials have been periodically mailing or hand-delivering immigration files of Iranians held in immigration custody directly to the Iranian government.

We are not talking about basic logistics paperwork, the kind of routine information governments share to arrange travel documents. The lawsuit alleges that asylum applications themselves were handed over. Those are the files where people describe, in detail, exactly why they are terrified to go back. Their political views. Who they demonstrated with. Whether they converted from Islam. Whether they are gay.

The filing also alleges that Immigration and Customs Enforcement held monthly meetings with the Iranian Interests Section, the body that handles Iran's consular business in the United States, and that asylum applications and deportation relief requests were shared during those meetings. According to the complaint, the meetings stopped after the U.S. attacked Iran in February, but the document sharing kept right on going.

The Detainees Already Knew Something Was Wrong

Here is how the lawyers at Public Citizen say they pieced this together: detainees in immigration custody started reporting something deeply unsettling. They were being called into meetings with senior Iranian Interests Section officials, and those officials already knew what was in their asylum claims.

Think about what that means for a second. You flee Iran. You file an asylum application with the U.S. government, trusting that the information is protected by federal law. Then a representative of the government you fled shows up and demonstrates, through the questions he asks, that he has read your file.

The lawsuit also draws on confidential testimony from an Iranian government official who allegedly confirmed the data-sharing policy. NPR noted it has not independently verified that specific claim, but the detainee accounts give it a foundation that is hard to wave away.

This Is Not a Gray Area

Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney with Public Citizen, was blunt with NPR about the legal situation. "The law is very clear that information within an asylum application or other applications for similar forms of protection cannot be shared particularly with the government that the individual is fleeing," he said. Federal regulations are explicit: Homeland Security and immigration courts are required to protect these records. The State Department carries its own obligation to maintain confidentiality even when records are transmitted abroad.

Kirkpatrick spelled out what happens when that protection fails. "They could be detained. They could be interrogated. They could be sent to prison. They could be tortured. As well as the risk to their family and acquaintances who remain in Iran." This is not hypothetical worst-case thinking. Iran has a well-documented history of doing exactly these things to people it considers dissidents or apostates or moral criminals.

The categories of information allegedly shared are particularly brutal in this context. Participation in pro-democracy protests. Membership in the LGBTQ community. Conversion to Christianity. Iran does not treat any of those as protected characteristics. It treats them as prosecutable offenses.

The Deportation Machine Running Alongside This

The information sharing didn't happen in isolation. According to Kirkpatrick, the Trump administration has already sent three deportation flights and over 100 people back to Iran, with the pace picking up just before the U.S. launched strikes on the country in February. Others have been deported to third countries including Panama and the Central African Republic, which raises its own set of questions about what exactly those arrangements look like.

The practical effect of sharing asylum files with Tehran, if the allegations hold up, is to hand Iran a list of its most wanted. People who told the U.S. government why they were afraid. People who trusted that information would stay confidential. And if they get deported back with that file already sitting in Tehran's inbox, they are not going home. They are being delivered.

What Happens Next

Public Citizen says it plans to seek a preliminary injunction to freeze the information sharing while the case proceeds, and to require that anyone whose file has already been shared be personally notified. That second part is its own kind of nightmare to contemplate, the logistics of telling hundreds of people that their secrets may now be in the hands of the government they fled.

The Homeland Security Department did not respond to NPR's request for comment. The Iranian Mission to the United Nations also did not respond. The silence from both ends of an alleged information pipeline is, let's say, notable.