Click the link below the picture
.
The Trump administration is deporting a planeload of about 100 Iranians back to Iran from the United States after a deal between the two governments, according to two senior Iranian officials involved in the negotiations and a U.S. official with knowledge of the plans.
Iranian officials said that the plane, a U.S.-chartered flight, took off from Louisiana on Monday night and was scheduled to arrive in Iran by way of Qatar on Tuesday at the earliest. The U.S. official confirmed that plans for the flight were in the final stages. All the officials spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details publicly.
The identities of the Iranians on the plane and their reasons for trying to immigrate to the United States were not immediately clear.
The deportation is one of the starkest efforts yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants, no matter the human rights conditions in countries on the receiving end. The expanding deportation campaign has sparked lawsuits by immigrant advocates, who have criticized the flights.
For decades, the United States had given shelter to Iranians fleeing their homeland, which has one of the harshest human rights records in the world. Iran persecutes women’s rights activists, political dissidents, journalists, lawyers, religious minorities, and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, among others.
In the past several years, there has been an increase in Iranian migrants arriving at the southern U.S. border and crossing illegally, including many who have claimed fear of persecution back home for their political and religious beliefs.
Hossein Noushabadi, the director general of parliamentary affairs in Iran’s foreign ministry, said on Tuesday that U.S. immigration authorities planned to deport 400 Iranians living in the United States back to Iran over the coming months.
“In the first phase, they decided to deport 120 Iranians who entered the U.S. illegally, mostly through Mexico,” he told Tasnim News Agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards force.
Some who will be deported held U.S. residency, he said, adding that all of those being deported left Iran legally.
The United States had long hesitated or had trouble deporting migrants to certain countries, like Iran, because of a lack of regularized diplomatic relations and an inability to get travel documents in a timely manner.
That had forced American officials to either hold migrants in detention for long periods or release them into the United States. The United States deported more than two dozen Iranians back to the country in 2024, the highest number in years.
The two Iranian officials who spoke to The Times said the deportees included men and women, some of them couples. Some had volunteered to leave after being in detention centers for months, and some had not, they said.
The officials said that in nearly every case, asylum requests had been denied or the people had not yet appeared before a judge for an asylum hearing.
The deportation is a rare moment of cooperation between the United States and the Iranian government, and was the culmination of months of discussions between the two countries, the Iranian officials said.
.
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly last week, President Trump insisted that the United States would double down on efforts to deport masses of migrants. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
.
.
Click the link below for the complete article:
.
__________________________________________
Leave a Reply