A quiet channel between ICE and Iran shaped deportation flights, newly released emails show

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been quietly coordinating with the Iranian government to arrange deportation flights for Iranian nationals—a functional diplomatic channel that persists even as the Biden administration imposed new sanctions on Tehran and rhetoric between the countries has escalated. The emails, released through FOIA requests and obtained by the Washington Times, show ICE officials communicating directly with Iranian aviation authorities and foreign ministry representatives to schedule flights, negotiate logistics, and transfer detainees. The coordination includes at least three confirmed deportation flights in early 2025, with Iranian officials approving flight paths, providing aircraft, and receiving passenger manifests before departure.

What's actually happening here is a collision between two incompatible official positions. The U.S. government simultaneously treats Iran as a hostile adversary warranting sanctions and military posturing while maintaining the kind of granular operational cooperation—shared passenger data, coordinated scheduling, equipment agreements—that typically only exists between aligned nations. For the roughly 8,000 Iranians in ICE custody at any given time, this arrangement means the agency has functioning infrastructure to remove them, which explains why Iranian deportations have accelerated 34 percent since Trump took office. But the same channel theoretically gives Iran access to manifests identifying which Iranian nationals the U.S. government has detained, their personal details, and whether they might be dissidents or politically sensitive figures.

The precedent here is the Obama-era nuclear negotiations, which required exactly this kind of back-channel operational cooperation despite public hostility. During the lead-up to the JCPOA, the U.S. and Iran maintained working relationships across immigration, aviation, and banking specifically to handle practical matters while official relations remained frozen. Those channels largely collapsed after Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018. That this coordination is resuming—quietly, through career ICE bureaucrats rather than diplomats—suggests both governments find certain mutual interests worth preserving even amid rhetorical escalation.

The straightforward conservative position: if Iran is an enemy state, we shouldn't be handing them manifests identifying Iranian nationals we've detained. Full stop. The fact that this is happening through routine agency channels rather than high-level negotiation actually makes it worse—it's bureaucratic inertia substituting for policy. Congress should have voted on whether ICE should have a working relationship with Iranian authorities. Instead, field agents made that call because it made their job easier. Whether you want to deport Iranians aggressively or cautiously, you don't want to do it in a way that hands the Iranian government an intelligence asset about which of its citizens are in U.S. custody or targeted for removal.

The ICE emails also reveal that officials briefly considered halting the deportations in January 2025 when tensions spiked following drone strikes and Iranian retaliation threats. That pause lasted less than 48 hours. A deputy director at ICE's National Criminal Analysis and Response Team sent a memo recommending resumption "absent direct presidential instruction otherwise"—meaning they felt they needed an explicit order from Trump to stop, not just elevated geopolitical risk. No such order came. The next scheduled deportation flight is set for late February, pending Iranian government approval of the flight plan.

Watch for two things: whether Congress moves to hold hearings on ICE's authority to unilaterally maintain operational relationships with foreign governments, and whether the State Department issues any formal guidance restricting what information can be shared on deportation manifests. The second is likely—diplomatic channels typically have classification protocols. The first is less certain but more consequential. Right now, ICE is operating under decades-old statutory authority to remove aliens, with minimal oversight of how they coordinate with other nations to do it. If this arrangement bothers you, the mechanism to change it exists. It just requires someone in Congress to care enough to push.