A country at war with another country is quietly feeding its enemy the names of people who fled it.

"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."

— Ali Rahnama, interim executive director, Iranian American Legal Defense Fund

The United States is at war with Iran. Bombs have fallen. American soldiers have died. And in the middle of it all, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration has been holding monthly meetings with Iranian officials to share confidential information about the very people the U.S. was supposed to be protecting.

The plaintiffs are the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and the Public Citizen Litigation Group. Their complaint names the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, and the State Department as defendants. The claim: starting in March 2025, the U.S. State Department arranged monthly meetings with Iranian government officials, using the Pakistani embassy as an intermediary, in which American officials shared detailed, sensitive information about detained Iranian immigrants the U.S. hoped to deport back to Iran.

The meetings continued even after the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran in February 2026, which escalated into a full war.

What made the disclosures particularly dangerous was what was being disclosed. According to the complaint, the information shared included details about asylum applications filed by Iranians who were persecuted for converting to Christianity, for their sexuality, or for participating in the "Women, Life, Freedom" protests against the Iranian government in 2022.

Federal regulations passed in the late 1990s explicitly prohibit the government from sharing information that could reveal an individual applied for asylum. The rule exists because asylum claims are confidential by design. If a government knows someone sought asylum, it knows that person has a political, religious, or personal grievance against it. In Iran's case, that grievance can be a death sentence.

ICE reportedly forced detained Iranian asylum applicants to meet with an Iranian government official who had extensive and specific knowledge about their applications. The detainees were held in facilities across numerous states, mostly in the South. The Iranian official was not a consul offering legal protections. He was an informant with access to the very details that could get these people killed upon return.

Translation: the U.S. was not just deporting Iranian dissidents. It was handing Tehran a dossier on them.

The scale of the operation is staggering. Roughly 600 Iranians were placed in immigration detention last year, according to public records obtained by the National Iranian American Council. In September 2025, Iranian officials acknowledged that as many as 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump administration. Three deportation flights followed, in September, December, and January, carrying dozens of Iranians back to a country where they faced certain retaliation.

The final deportation flight left in January 2026, just weeks after the Iranian government killed thousands of its own citizens in a brutal crackdown on domestic protests. The New York Times reported at the time that some of those deported were asylum seekers.

Then in June 2026, an Iranian woman was among the two dozen migrants the U.S. deported to the Central African Republic, a practice that bypassed the traditional deportation framework entirely.

The administration's immigration crackdown has been comprehensive. DHS announced over 600,000 deportations in 2025, alongside roughly 1.9 million immigrants who voluntarily left. But the Iranian program stands apart because it involves cooperation with a government the U.S. is actively bombing.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to halt the sharing of asylum seeker information with Iran and to appoint an independent monitor to prevent future disclosures. They are also seeking to force the government to cease detaining Iranian asylum applicants in conditions that facilitate meetings with Iranian officials.

Michael Kirkpatrick of the Public Citizen Litigation Group called it what it was: "Despite the U.S.'s ongoing war with Iran, the administration seems more committed to mass deportation than protecting human lives."

The irony is not lost on anyone paying attention. For decades since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the U.S. has served as a refuge for Iranian dissidents, exiles, and opponents of the regime. The administration has now inverted that practice. It is collaborating with a theocracy it is at war with to identify, detain, and deport the people who fled that theocracy.

The DHS and State Department did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday morning.

The broader context makes the allegations even more remarkable. The Trump administration has been promoting its immigration enforcement as a matter of national security. The rhetoric is familiar: protect American borders, remove dangerous criminals, restore order at the border. But sharing confidential asylum data with a hostile foreign government is not border security. It is intelligence sharing with an adversary, using human beings as the currency.

When Ali Rahnama said that Congress made confidentiality protections mandatory because lives depend on them, he was not speaking hypothetically. In Iran, being identified as a Christian convert, an LGBTQ person, or a pro-democracy activist can mean torture, imprisonment, or execution. By transmitting that information to Iranian officials, the U.S. government may have signed death warrants for people it was legally required to protect.

The lawsuit asks a court to stop it before more information crosses the border. Whether the court will act quickly enough to protect the people still in detention remains to be seen.

The United States is dropping bombs on Iran and handing Tehran the names of the Iranians it is supposed to be shielding. The question is not whether that is a contradiction. The question is how many people pay for it before anyone calls it by its proper name.