US deports 100 Iranians amid immigration crackdown and rare Iran cooperation

The United States has deported roughly 100 Iranians back to their home country amid an expanding immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, the New York Times reported citing top officials.

A US-chartered flight carrying the deportees took off from Louisiana on Monday (local time) and was scheduled to arrive in Iran via Qatar on Tuesday, the officials said.

The deportation followed months of negotiations between Washington and Tehran, according to two senior Iranian officials privy to the discussions who spoke to NYT. It marks a rare moment of direct cooperation between the two governments, coming just months after Trump ordered strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.

Iranian officials told NYT the planeload of deportees included men and women, some of them couples. Their identities and their reasons for seeking entry into the US were not shared.

While some Iranians had volunteered for deportation after months in detention centres, others had not. In nearly every case, asylum requests had either been denied or the individuals had not yet appeared before a judge for a hearing, they said.

Previous US governments offered refuge to Iranians fleeing one of the world’s harshest human rights regimes. In recent years, more Iranians have crossed the southern US border illegally. Many have claimed fear of persecution back home for their political and religious beliefs.

Trump and his officials have repeatedly insisted that their hard-line immigration policy focuses on rooting out and expelling dangerous criminals. The US President has vowed to deport “the worst of the worst” and has blamed migrants for bringing “crime, drugs, misery and death” to the country.

But the move to ship out the Iranians, that too, in concert with Tehran, signals a clear effort by the Trump administration to remove migrants regardless of the human rights conditions they may face in their homeland.

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