Order to Deport Iranians Issued Amid Bombing. Story Reached Europe Without the Name of the Newsroom That Exposed It

The American immigration police ICE negotiated deportation flights with Tehran for more than one hundred Iranians. This is shown by hundreds of internal emails that the Iranian-American organization NIAC obtained through legal proceedings and exclusively provided to the website The Intercept. The order to prioritize deportations was issued on June 19, 2025, when Israel was bombing Iran and American strikes were to come three days later, and officials referred to it in emails as a "White House priority". Within two days the story reached the Netherlands, Belgium and Romania via the AP agency, but it lost the name of the newsroom that exposed it along the way. Slovak and Czech media did not cover it at all. The Intercept ↗

What's in Those Emails

On June 19, 2025, then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons sent a directive from his BlackBerry to deportation operations chief Marcos Charles and deputy director Madison Sheahan. Israel had been bombing Iran for the sixth day at that point, with the U.S. joining the war on June 22. Charles forwarded it within an hour: "Begin working on a plan to remove all deportable Iranians with final orders who are in custody. We need a plan as soon as possible." Subordinates objected that Tehran was not issuing travel documents and Iranian airspace was closed due to bombing, with people fleeing the country. One official wrote that a solution needed to be found for the "White House priority". The Intercept ↗

In June 2025, according to Charles's email, ICE held 522 Iranian citizens in custody, of which 244 had valid deportation orders. The first flight departed on September 29, 2025 from Louisiana via Puerto Rico and Cairo to Qatar, from where a Qatar Airways charter transported 54 Iranians to Tehran. Flights followed on December 7 and January 25, both via Kuwait. The fourth was supposed to go at the end of March but was prevented only by the fact that at the end of February the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran again. The program thus did not run during the current war, but in the gap between two wars. The Intercept ↗

The emails show that the Iranian side had influence over whom the U.S. would return. "At the request of the Iranian embassy, I added several cases," wrote an unnamed ICE official. Yet Washington and Tehran have had no diplomatic relations since 1980, and Iranian interests in the U.S. are represented by an interests section at the Pakistani embassy. CBS News ↗

Two details mostly did not make it into the adopted versions. One of the most active coordinators was ICE attaché Joshua Coster from the branch of the American embassy in Tel Aviv, even though the flight was never supposed to stop in Israel. And a person who should not have been there ended up on board: "An Iranian citizen who was not on the final list was loaded onto the flight. That is unfortunate," wrote Coster. A colleague replied: "I have no idea how that case or person got on the plane." The man was nonetheless sent to Iran. NIAC ↗

How the Story Spread and What Was Lost

The Intercept published the material on the morning of August 18. Two days later, AP released a wire service report that acknowledged the source with a sentence stating that The Intercept first described the emails. The version published by CBS News that same day stands on nearly identical text and states that "the Associated Press worked on the report". The Intercept does not appear in it once. AP (Local 10) ↗

The story thus reached Europe already without its original source. In the Netherlands and Belgium, it was published by de Volkskrant, De Morgen, Trouw, and NU.nl, which looks like four independent newsrooms, but all four titles belong to one company, Belgian DPG Media. Volkskrant and De Morgen even have the same identifier in the article address, meaning it is one and the same text. Romanian Adevărul cited Euronews. Trouw ↗

The Dutch headline says Iran had influence on the flights "even after the start of the war". In that context it makes sense, referring to the war from June 2025. However, a Slovak reader today would think of the current war, which has been running since the end of February, under the word "war". The same sentence elsewhere means something different, and such a shift always occurs when a story is translated without access to the original documents. NU.nl ↗

Why the Slovak Reader Didn't Get It

It's not because SK and CZ media avoid Iran—dozens of articles about economic war and the Strait of Hormuz came out in three days. Nor is it that deportations aren't a topic: teraz.sk wrote about expelling Cubans and Venezuelans to Liberia on August 19, and Seznam Zprávy on August 20. The difference is where the story comes from. Those topics came from wire service reports that newsrooms subscribe to. A story built on documents obtained through FOIA and exclusively provided to one newsroom won't enter the news agency channel unless someone deliberately lets it in. Seznam Zprávy ↗

Read also: USA Toughened Stance Against Iran, Tehran Speaks of Economic Terrorism

Limits of This Perspective

NIAC is not a neutral intermediary. It is a Washington advocacy organization that lobbies against war with Iran and for the lifting of sanctions, supported the 2015 nuclear deal, is currently being sued by ICE, and itself selected which newsroom would receive the documents first. Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Mike Braun called for an investigation in 2020 into whether NIAC was violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The government never took action on the matter and NIAC denies the accusations as slander. The Intercept ↗

The Department of Homeland Security calls the claim about sharing asylum files with Tehran "false" and states that among the 54 returned were "terrorists, human smugglers and suspected foreign agents," all with valid orders and through proper proceedings. The Intercept, on the other hand, writes that among the deported were political activists and members of ethnic and religious minorities. Neither can be verified from the emails, with the names of officials and plans redacted. The Intercept also has its own perspective, long critical of American security agencies. CBS News ↗

What hotinfo Follows