The Trump administration deported more than 21,000 people to countries the State Department deems too dangerous for American citizens to visit, including at least 600 children and an aggressive new push to return Iranians to a country the U.S. was simultaneously preparing to bomb, according to data analyzed through March 15, 2026.
The findings, drawn from Immigration and Customs Enforcement records obtained by the Deportation Data Project and published May 29, 2026, reveal a stark contradiction at the heart of U.S. policy: while the State Department warned Americans away from places like Iran, Ukraine, Haiti and Myanmar — citing terrorism, kidnapping and wrongful detention — the federal government was loading planes with deportees bound for those same destinations.
The overwhelming majority of those deported had no criminal convictions. The data does not track how many had filed asylum claims.
Deportations on the Eve of War
The Iran deportations stand out as among the most jarring. In the first 13 months of President Donald Trump’s second term leading up to the war, the United States deported more than 200 people to Iran — the first time in more than a decade the U.S. government has done so in large numbers. Three planeloads have departed since September 2025, tracked by the nonprofit Human Rights First.
In late January 2026, even as the administration weighed airstrikes and steamed the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group toward the Persian Gulf, 18 people were flown to Iran. The last of them landed just days before American and Israeli bombs began falling across the country.
Susan Akram, a law professor with Boston University’s International Human Rights Clinic, called the removals “immoral and totally inhumane” and argued they violated both U.S. and international law. The bipartisan 1980 Refugee Act adopted the international prohibition against returning asylum seekers to countries where their life or freedom is threatened. A separate, broader rule bars sending anyone — regardless of immigration status — to a place where they may be tortured.
ICE did not respond to repeated questions about how and when it deports people to countries the State Department classifies as unsafe.
A Flight From Arizona
The starkest example came on Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, when ICE scheduled a flight out of Arizona carrying at least 40 Iranian nationals, according to reporting published Jan. 23, 2026. Two of the passengers were gay men who had fled Iran in 2022 after being arrested by the country’s morality police and facing what their attorney described as a likely death sentence.
Homosexuality is illegal in Iran and punishable by death. The regime executed two gay men in 2022, and rights groups consider the country among the world’s most repressive for LGBT people. Both clients had entered the United States in early 2025 on asylum claims, had no criminal convictions, and were in the middle of appeals when ICE moved to remove them.
“They’re terrified,” Rebekah Wolf, a lawyer with the American Immigration Council, told MS NOW. One of her clients, she said, “calls every 45 minutes begging me to save his life.”
Wolf said neither man received a meaningful hearing on his asylum claim. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Cooperative Tehran
The deportations were possible, advocates say, because Iran — after decades in which the United States welcomed Iranian dissidents — had quietly agreed to take its nationals back. One man on the flight list had children who are U.S. citizens. He had arrived in the United States as a minor, lived there for years, carried a prior order of removal for nonviolent offenses and had been checking in regularly with ICE. Officials selected him for enforcement, his family said, because Tehran would now accept him.
The deportees also included a Christian convert and a political dissident, both at acute risk of persecution under a regime that, in early January, killed at least 3,000 demonstrators while crushing protests sparked by the country’s collapsing economy.
That same month, Trump told Politico that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was “a sick man” who should “stop killing people,” and called Iran “the worst place to live anywhere in the world.” He told Iranian protesters that “help is on its way.” On Jan. 22, he told reporters: “A massive fleet heading in that direction, and maybe we won’t have to use it. We’ll see.”
A Defense and a Warning
Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said deportees would have had multiple opportunities to contest removal in what he called “a rather robust due process system” that determined returning them was not unsafe.
Akram countered that the consequences of ignoring international protections extend well beyond the deportees themselves. If the United States violates international norms in its treatment of foreign nationals, she said, it invites other governments to treat American citizens the same way.
The State Department currently identifies 23 countries where Americans should not travel. Ukraine remains a war zone. Armored vehicles still patrol Port-au-Prince. On April 7, 2026, Iranian workers were photographed clearing rubble from around the destroyed Khorasaniha synagogue in Tehran — one casualty of the bombing campaign that began only days after the last U.S. deportation flight landed.
A relative of one Iranian deportee put the family’s fear plainly: “I’m worried he could be detained or worse, killed.”