Iran has announced that 120 of its citizens are being deported from the United States this week as part of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“120 people should be deported and flown home over the next couple of days,” Hossein Noushabadi, a consular affairs official at Iran’s foreign ministry, told the Tasnim news agency on Tuesday, September 30. He added that US authorities had decided to remove around 400 Iranians currently in the country, most of them accused of entering illegally.
The New York Times reported that roughly 100 Iranians who had sought refuge in the US were being returned under an agreement reached between Washington and Tehran after months of negotiations, a rare deal between two governments long at odds.
According to the paper, a US-chartered aircraft departed Louisiana on Monday evening and was scheduled to land in Tehran on Tuesday after a stopover in Qatar. It described the move as “the most stark push yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants even to places with harsh human rights conditions.”
Neither the US State Department nor immigration authorities have immediately commented. Earlier this year, Washington deported several Iranians, many of them Christians, to Costa Rica and Panama, highlighting the administration’s drive to send migrants to third countries despite concerns over safety and rights conditions.
