Wed. July 8, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. -
A harrowing new lawsuit shows that the Trump administration willingly gave up names of asylum seekers from Iran to the Islamic Republic. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit depicts a "coordinated campaign between the U.S. and Iranian governments to identify Iranians in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and pressure them to return to Iran."
Before the U.S. went to war with Iran, Trump officials shared the names and immigration records of Iranian asylum seekers directly with the Iranian government. It was a planned move that let Iranian officials pick out the exact people they wanted to drag back.
This is terrifying. The people caught up in this are political dissidents and LGBTQ folks who risked absolutely everything to escape state-sponsored terror. In Iran, being queer or speaking out against the regime is a death sentence. These folks fled to America believing our laws would protect them from death. Instead, the U.S. government turned their private data into a tracking device for their oppressors.
As Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, told NPR, "The law is very clear that information within an asylum application or other applications for similar forms of protection cannot be shared particularly with the government that the individual is fleeing."
He warned that this information could put people in grave risk, saying, "They could be detained. They could be interrogated. They could be sent to prison. They could be tortured."
By handing over these files, the administration basically gave a brutal regime a hit list. It gave them the exact roadmap they need to track these folks down, target their families back home, and wait for them.
For an LGBTQ person or a dissident, deportation isn't just a legal process anymore. Disclosing this info puts them at direct risk of "persecution, torture, and death following their arrival in Iran," according to the lawsuit.
Kirkpatrick put it perfectly when he stated, "Despite the U.S.'s ongoing war with Iran, the administration seems more committed to mass deportation than protecting human lives."
The Department of Homeland Security has denied the claims, calling them "FALSE," but the details in the filing are sickening. The administration is so obsessed with its anti-immigrant agenda that it'll gladly work with a hostile dictatorship, ironically our enemy in the current war, to kick vulnerable people out. The cruelty isn't just a side effect of American policy, it's the whole point.
When a government strips away the basic right to seek safety and treats marginalized lives like garbage, it loses all moral authority. As Ali Rahnama of the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund pointed out, "Congress made these confidentiality protections mandatory precisely because lives depend on them, and no agency and no administration, of either party, may set them aside."
It's a terrifying reality where the state doesn't just fail to protect the oppressed, it actually teams up with the oppressors. If America is going to hand over queer people and dissidents to a government that executes them, then nobody looking for freedom is safe under President Donald Trump and his disciples.
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