America Is Bombing Iran and Deporting Iranians Back to Iran at the Same Time

The Deportation Deal Nobody Talked About

In 2025, the Trump administration reached an agreement with the Iranian government to deport as many as 400 Iranians held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, per the Guardian. The U.S. and Iran have had no diplomatic relations since 1980. The existence of the deal was disclosed by Iranian state media in September 2025 and confirmed by U.S. officials.

The first flight carrying approximately 120 Iranians departed in September 2025, per Al Jazeera. A second flight followed in December. A third batch was deported in January 2026, per Reuters on January 26. At least 175 people have been sent back in total across the three flights, per Reuters. Many were described by immigration advocates as refugees and asylum seekers fleeing political and religious persecution.

In December 2025, ICE began what Time magazine described as a broader push against Iranian immigrants, "reversing decades of policy that had largely allowed Iranians fleeing political and religious persecution to remain in the U.S." A White House proclamation expanded immigration restrictions effective January 1, 2026, pausing immigrant visa processing for 75 countries, with Iran among those most severely affected, per Truthout citing State Department documents.

On February 28, 2026, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Deportation flights to Iran were paused after the war began. A White House official told Time that the administration is "utilizing all lawful methods to carry out deportation operations of criminal illegal aliens" and declined to say whether flights to Iran would resume.

Detained During a War on Your Homeland

Time magazine documented the situation of Iranian nationals currently in ICE custody through the story of two individuals it identified with pseudonyms as Ali and Adel — a gay couple in their late 30s and early 40s who fled Iran in 2021 after being arrested by Iran's morality police. Same-sex activity is punishable by death in Iran, per AP. The couple traveled from Turkey to Mexico and crossed into the U.S. at El Paso.

Their asylum claims were denied in early 2025. ICE subsequently prepared them for deportation. Their attorney, Bekah Wolf, director of the Immigration Justice Campaign, told Time: "I have never had a case in 10-plus years, where I was so certain that they would be sent back to death."

Court orders have so far prevented their deportation. As of Time's March 26 report, Ali was being held in an ICE facility in Arizona; Adel was being held near El Paso in a facility that the Trump administration was moving to shut down following reports of abuse, medical neglect, and dozens of federal standards violations, per the Washington Post.

Wolf told Time that Adel's condition had become medically dire. "He's incredibly frail, to the point where he could no longer ambulate. He couldn't walk because of the pain. He had to have other detainees pick him up and carry him to the bathroom and to the shower, which was incredibly distressing."

El País (Spain) reported in March that the deportation arrangements with Iran involved the U.S. negotiating with Iranian authorities on migration policy — an unusual relationship given the complete absence of formal diplomatic ties. An immigration attorney who spoke to El País described the arrangement as paradoxical: "If the U.S. position is that the Iranian regime is repressive and undemocratic, the fact that we negotiated with them over our migration policy is astonishing."

Who Iranian Americans Are: The Numbers

As of 2024, there were approximately 750,000 Iranian Americans in the United States, according to Pew Research Center's analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey. This makes Iranian Americans approximately 0.2 percent of the U.S. population.

The Iranian American population grew more than fourfold between 1980 and 2024, per Pew. Growth was especially rapid in the 1980s and 1990s, when large numbers of Iranians fled following the 1979 Islamic Revolution and during the Iran-Iraq War.

Wikipedia's Iranian diaspora article, citing the UN's international migrant stock data, puts the total Iranian diaspora in the United States at over one million when including all people of Iranian descent — a higher figure than the Pew count, which uses a stricter methodology requiring birthplace, ancestry, or parentage reporting in official surveys. Al Jazeera cited a figure of more than 413,000 for the foreign-born Iranian population specifically.

The differences in these figures reflect methodology: Pew counts people who self-identify as Iranian through birthplace, ancestry, or parental origin; higher estimates include Iranians who may not have self-reported their heritage in surveys.

The large majority of Iranian Americans live in California, particularly the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside Iran — a community sometimes referred to as "Tehrangeles," per the Guardian.

A Divided Community: What the Diaspora Thinks

The Iranian American community has not responded to the war with a unified political voice. The Guardian's reporting from March 21 described a broad spectrum of reactions.

Some — particularly those who fled the Islamic Republic after the 1979 revolution or during the protests and massacres of 2025–2026 — initially experienced what one Iranian American identified as "Nasser" described to the Guardian as "a flash of hope, or maybe vengeance, when Khamenei and his circle were hit." (The Guardian used pseudonyms for sources who asked for anonymity due to concerns about retribution against family inside Iran.)

But by the time the Guardian published its report — after three weeks of all-out war and with thousands of Iranians dead — Nasser told the reporter: "Now I feel sick about it."

Another source, identified as "Ali," described his reaction to pro-monarchy Iranian Americans who cheered the strikes: "I have anger, righteous anger."

The Guardian noted that the diaspora's political divisions run deep. Some Iranians support a return of the monarchy toppled in 1979; others are committed republicans or reformists; others are focused entirely on leaving Iran's politics behind and building lives in America. "The diaspora is, as such, by no means uniform or homogenous," the Guardian wrote, noting that "many of those divisions can be found within the same families."

Negar Razavi, a scholar at Princeton University's Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, described the mood of dissidents and Iranian Americans broadly to Al Jazeera as an atmosphere of "dual fear." "There is a sense that nowhere is really safe for them," Razavi said. "They're neither safe here, nor are they safe back home."

The Expat Visa Cancellations

The conflict's reach extends to Iranians living in third countries as well. Wikipedia's 2026 Iranian diaspora protests article reported that as of March 28, Iranian expatriates in the United Arab Emirates were having their residency visas canceled and were being repatriated to Iran via Afghanistan. The UAE has not publicly confirmed or denied this policy. If accurate, it would represent a narrowing of safe third-country options for Iranians who had previously used the UAE as a transit point or longer-term residence option.

This could not be independently confirmed from available sources as of this article's publication. It is noted here as a reported development, not a verified one.

The Legal Paradox

The Iran deportation situation creates a legal and policy paradox that Politico examined in a March 27 report. ICE was attempting to deport Iranians to a country the U.S. was simultaneously bombing — and had negotiated deportation logistics with a government it has no formal diplomatic relations with and which its own officials describe as a terrorist-sponsoring adversary.

With flights paused due to the war, Iranians in ICE detention face an indefinite legal limbo: they cannot be deported to a war zone, but they also face continued detention without a clear legal path to release. Habeas corpus petitions are working their way through courts. The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on whether the administration's deportation arrangements with Iran were legally valid.

At least one Iranian's deportation was blocked by emergency court order in early 2026, per Politico citing court records. The broader question — whether hundreds of Iranians can legally be held indefinitely in ICE detention when deportation to their country of origin is not currently possible — remains unresolved.