The Foreign Ministry of Iran confirmed on Tuesday it is expecting to receive 120 Iranian nationals deported from the United States, many of them identified as illegal immigrants who crossed into America through the southern border with Mexico.
The Iranian state propaganda outlet PressTV cited Parliamentary Director General of the Foreign Ministry Hossein Noushabadi as the official responsible for confirming the acceptance of the deported individuals. PressTV, which often published outlandishly vitriolic content against the United States, announced the return of the Iranians in a notably neutral article stating only that President Donald Trump has increased the number of “aggressive deportations” due to “years of insufficient enforcement, including under his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.”
Tehran’s decision to receive its returned nationals seemingly without incident is an outlier in the acrimonious relationship between the repressive Islamist regime and the United States. Its timing is especially remarkable given that, with the support of the United States, the other Western members of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iran nuclear deal, restored pre-agreement sanctions on Iran this week.
“US Immigration Service is planning to expel about 400 Iranians currently living in the United States, most of whom entered illegally, in light of the new approach of the US government, which has an anti-immigrant approach,” Noushabadi reportedly said. He did not clarify if the 120 en route to Iran are separate from the 400 total expected to return. The official stated that those returning are flying out of the United States to Qatar and will then be processed and returned to Iran.
Noushabadi claimed that not all those deported entered the country illegally. Some, he claimed, “had residence permits, for reasons stated by the US Immigration Service, they decided to include them on the list.” Some also reportedly had asylum requests denied.
The official claimed that Tehran went out of its way to demand Washington “be sensitive to respecting the rights of Iranian immigrants.” The statement stands in contrast to the Iranian regime’s record of systematic human rights abuses against their own citizens for decades, including indiscriminately murdering, torturing, and disappearing suspected political dissidents, members of religious minorities, and especially women.
Noushabadi also added that the individuals in question would face “no restrictions” upon returning home, beyond the general repression that all Iranian citizens face under a terrorist Islamist regime. The official indicated that the individuals had not violated Iranian law and did not suggest that any of them were fleeing political persecution, were dissidents, or faced any such status.
The PressTV report followed an anonymously sourced claim in the leftist newspaper New York Times on Tuesday that the deportations were occurring. The independent outlet Iran International, citing the Times, reported that the Iranians were flying out of Louisiana on Monday and would first land in Qatar. Iran International also noted that the Trump administration had previously deported Iranians this year, but not back to Iran: “Earlier this year, groups of Iranians, including converts to Christianity who face possible persecution at home, were flown to Costa Rica and Panama.”
The U.S. State Department has emphasized work this year on convincing nations whose citizens enter the United States illegally to accept them as deportees. The most high-profile cases of such negotiations have been in Latin America, where some nations friendly to the Trump administration, most prominently El Salvador, have reacted positively to welcoming their citizens home. The government of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele went a step further, offering in February to take in citizens of third-party countries for a fee. In March, Washington deported a group of Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador accused of being members of the regime-linked Tren de Aragua terror gang.
Outside of Latin America, the Trump administration has also engaged in large-scale deportations to other friendly countries. In another notable instance in September, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials raided a factory and apprehended 300 South Korean nationals working in the United States without proper paperwork, offending the leftist government in Seoul.
Speaking to Breitbart News on September 26, a senior State Department official described negotiations to repatriate illegal immigrants as a core success of the administration so far.
“Illegal immigration, we have made huge strides on that,” the official said. “In the first months of this administration, where everybody in the region is taking their own citizens back. We have other countries that are cooperating with us in trying to deal with people who can’t be returned to their own countries and finding them a suitable and safe outcome.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on September 23 that, as of that date, 2 million illegal immigrants have either been deported or voluntarily left America during President Trump’s second term in office. Should the current pace of deportations hold, ICE is on track to deport 600,000 illegal immigrants by the end of the first year of Trump’s second term in office.
“Ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: Self-deport or we will arrest and deport you,” DHS’s Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
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