LOS ANGELES — A lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that the Trump administration’s immigration agencies have been sharing sensitive information about Iranian asylum seekers with the Iranian government, violating domestic immigration regulations and endangering countless Iranians, court papers argue.

The lawsuit describes 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, a sharp departure from decades of diplomatic hostility between the two governments and an ongoing war.

About 600 Iranians were detained for immigration reasons last year, according to public records obtained by the National Iranian American Council. In June, an Iranian woman was among two dozen immigrants the United States deported to the Central African Republic, in a marked departure from a decades-long U.S. practice of welcoming Iranian dissidents, exiles and others since the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced large numbers of Iranians to flee.

The U.S. government is allowed to work with government officials in foreign countries to coordinate deportation logistics. However, federal regulations passed in the late 1990s prohibit the government from sharing information that could reveal that the deported person has requested asylum.

“Congress made these confidentiality protections mandatory precisely because lives depend on them, and no agency or administration, on either side, can set them aside,” said Ali Rahnama, acting executive director of the Iranian-American Legal Defense Fund.

Beginning in March 2025, the U.S. State Department hosted monthly meetings with Iranian officials, using the Pakistani embassy as an intermediary, in which U.S. officials shared detailed and sensitive information about detained Iranian immigrants whom the U.S. government hoped to deport, lawyers from the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and the Public Citizen Litigation Group wrote in a complaint.

The information included details about asylum claims filed by people who say they were persecuted for converting to Christianity, for their sexuality or for participating in the Women, Life, Freedom protests against the Iranian government in 2022, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in US District Court in Washington, DC.

ICE forced Iranian asylum seekers who had been detained in numerous facilities, mostly southern states, to meet with an Iranian government official who had extensive and specific knowledge about their claims, according to the complaint. The information was shared even after joint US-Israeli strikes against Iran started the war against Iran in February 2026.

The lawsuit seeks to stop sharing information about asylum seekers with the Iranian government and appoint an independent monitor to prevent future disclosures.

“Despite the United States’ ongoing war with Iran, the administration appears more committed to mass deportation than protecting human life,” Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group, said in a statement.

The complaint names the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and the State Department as some of the defendants. The Department of Homeland Security and the State Department did not respond to an emailed request for comment Tuesday morning.

The indictments come amid President Donald Trump’s ambitious and aggressive immigration crackdown that involved more than 600,000 deportations and caused approximately 1.9 million immigrants to leave voluntarily in 2025 alone, according to an announcement made by DHS.

Iranian officials acknowledged in September 2025 that up to 400 Iranians could be returned under an agreement with the Trump administration. That month, the first of three deportation flights brought dozens of Iranians back to Iran. The second deportation flight took place in December 2025, and the last recorded deportation flight departed in late January 2026, about a month before the war against Iran began, and just weeks after the Iranian government killed thousands of citizens as part of a brutal crackdown on protests. The New York Times reported at the time that some of those deported on the September, December and January flights were asylum seekers.