Here is a sentence that should not be boring, and yet somehow the news cycle let it pass with barely a shrug: American immigration officials spent 2025 taking direction from the Iranian Embassy on who got deported and when. Not "worked around." Not "coordinated with, reluctantly, for logistics." Took requests. Newly released emails, made public by the National Iranian American Council and reported first by the Washington Post, lay out a "quiet channel" between ICE and Tehran that arranged three deportation flights returning more than 100 Iranians home in September and December 2025 and January 2026.
One ICE official put it in writing, plainly, in late August 2025:
"Per request from the Iran Embassy I added a few cases."Another wrote that "Iran has requested that I amend the previous manifest and expedite the removal process" — after a sit-down with the Iranian Embassy's director. A third flagged that a man not on the manifest sent to the Qatari Ministry of Interior was quietly boarded anyway. This is not diplomacy. This is a foreign adversary editing a deportation list and an American law enforcement agency saying, essentially, sure, whatever works.
The timing is the part that should make even the most disciplined Washington-defender wince. Then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons called Iranian repatriation a "priority" in June 2025 — during the twelve-day shooting war between the United States, Israel, and Iran. While American aircraft were in the sky over Iranian nuclear sites, someone in this administration decided the more urgent errand was making sure the deportation paperwork moved on Tehran's schedule. Officials didn't just tolerate contact with a hostile government's diplomats; they took a punch list from them mid-conflict.
It gets worse before it gets any better. Eleven Iranians held in ICE detention say they were forced into meetings with Iranian government officials — officials who reportedly already knew intimate, specific details of their asylum claims. That is not a paperwork slip. If even partly true, it means the country these people fled learned exactly what they told American courts to prove they were in danger from that same country. DHS denies sharing asylum records with Iran, and a lawsuit over the allegation is pending in a Washington federal court, so treat the sharing itself as allegation, not proven fact — but the emails about manifest edits are not allegation. They're the department's own words.
I have spent three election cycles pulling the lever for an administration that promised to put American interests first and stop treating adversarial regimes as reasonable counterparties. I still believe illegal removal enforcement, done straight, is legitimate and overdue. But there's a difference between enforcing the law and letting a hostile foreign government quietly co-author it. If the "America First" label means anything, it cannot coexist with an "Iran requested it, so we did it" paper trail. Competence and loyalty to the people who elected this administration are supposed to be the whole pitch — not just for the last administration's failures, but for this one's, too. Somebody needs to explain why Tehran's embassy had more editorial input on a federal manifest than Congress did.