A Lawsuit Says the U.S. Gave Iran the Files of the Iranians Who Fled It.

A lawsuit filed this week alleges that U.S. immigration agencies shared confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with the government of Iran, the very government those people fled. The complaint, reported by NPR, says the disclosures included applicants’ identities, family relationships, political opinions, and the specific reasons they said they feared Iran.

The whole premise of asylum is that the United States will not tip off the persecutor. If the allegation holds up, that promise was broken in the most direct way possible.

What the Complaint Alleges

The suit describes a coordinated effort, not a leak. It says U.S. agencies began sharing application details with Iran in March 2025 and that ICE made detained Iranian asylum applicants meet with an Iranian government official who already had specific knowledge of their cases. The sharing allegedly continued even after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began the war in February 2026.

The plaintiffs are represented by Public Citizen and the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund. The complaint names Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, acting ICE Director David Venturella, and their agencies as defendants.

Who This Endangers

The people at the center of this are not abstractions. They are dissidents, and among them LGBTQ+ Iranians, who fled a state that jails and executes its critics. For those applicants, having their file read by an Iranian official is not a privacy violation. It is a target painted on them for the day they might be returned.

Sharing their information exposes them to imprisonment, torture, or death if they are deported. It also reverses a stance the United States has held since 1979, when it began taking in Iranians escaping the same government.

The Government’s Denial

The administration says the allegation is false. ICE said it does not share asylum records with Iran and that it only facilitates “consular access to detained individuals, in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and agency policy.”

Those two accounts cannot both be fully true, and the gap between them is exactly what a court and congressional oversight exist to close. Until it is closed, the safest course is the one that cannot be undone by a wrong answer: do not deport the people who say their files were handed to the country they escaped.

What You Can Do Now

Use the letter below to demand your senators and representative open an investigation into whether asylum applicants’ protected information was disclosed to any foreign government, halt any such sharing immediately, and block the deportation of these asylum seekers while the facts are established.
Call your members of Congress at (202) 224-3121. Ask them whether they believe the government should ever be allowed to give a persecuting regime the files of the people fleeing it, and what they will do to stop it here.
Support the litigation and the community. Public Citizen and the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund brought this case, and local immigrant-rights groups help asylum seekers find counsel. Their work is the front line while the courts sort out the facts.