A few minutes after midnight on Tuesday, September 30, the New York Times published a breaking news story about a flight in the air on its way from Louisiana to Tehran, the capital city of Iran. Citing U.S. and Iranian officials, the story indicated that the chartered flight took off late Monday and would stop briefly in Qatar before reaching its final destination on Tuesday.

While the exact makeup of the deportees is unclear as of this publication, there has been an uptick in Iranian asylum seekers in recent years, many of them seeking protection from religious persecution.

According to Iranian officials interviewed by the Times, Monday’s flight was made up of men and women and included individuals whose asylum cases have yet to be heard by a U.S. judge.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration deported a group of Christian asylum seekers from Iran to Costa Rica and Panama without hearings. Christianity is severely persecuted in Iran, with the hardline theocratic regime there consistently ranking as one of the world’s most egregious persecutors.

The U.S. does not have formal diplomatic relations with Iran, and the two countries have been consistently hostile toward each other, rarely cooperating.

In the year leading up to September 30, 2024, the U.S. deported 27 Iranian nationals, according to official U.S. government reports aggregating data on the more than 270,000 deportations to 192 countries in fiscal year 2024. It is not clear from public government records whether these deportations were to Iran or to third countries, as the data is recorded by country of citizenship rather than destination.

However, previous press releases and media reports suggest that at least some of these cases may have included returns to Iran via commercial flight. The U.S. has previously returned persons charged with violating U.S. trade secret laws or illegally exporting sensitive equipment with possible military applications.

According to a 2024 Immigration and Customs Enforcement report, the department focused its “enforcement and removal operations on noncitizens who [were] threats to national security, public safety, and border security.”

Long History of Persecution in Iran

Human rights conditions in the country are abysmal, with U.S. government and civil society reports consistently documenting deplorable prison conditions, severe torture, and even the execution of religious minorities.

Iran is one of only three countries in the world to have been designated as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) every single year since designations began in 1999, according to research by International Christian Concern.

The CPC designation indicates that Iran is known to engage in or tolerate particularly severe religious freedom violations, defined as “systematic, ongoing, and egregious” violations like torture, forced disappearances, or other flagrant denials of basic human rights. The other countries designated every year since 1999 are China and Myanmar, also referred to as Burma in government reports.

The Christian church in Iran is, according to some experts, the fastest-growing in the world. Given their rapid growth in the country, Christians face particularly severe persecution by a regime that sees them as an existential threat to the supremacy of the country’s Islamic theocracy.

Apostasy, or leaving Islam for another faith, is a criminal offense under Iranian law and is punishable by death.

Recent Crackdown on Religious Minorities

According to Article 18, a human rights watchdog organization, the imprisonment of Christians grew sixfold in 2024 compared to the previous year. Its research found that Iranian courts sentenced 96 Christians to a combined 263 years in prison in 2024. Iran executed more than 900 people in 2024. It handed down “scores of death sentences for religious-based charges,” according to a March report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a U.S. government body.

These troubling statistics represent a 38% increase in average sentence length and a sixfold increase in cumulative sentencing compared to 2023. Several Christians received particularly harsh sentences of ten years or more, according to the Article 18 report.

USCIRF released a report in July on religious persecution in the Islamic Republic of Iran. One of the world’s few theocracies, Iran has a long history of violent persecution against disfavored religious groups.

July’s USCIRF report highlights government persecution of Christians, Baha’is, Jews, Sunnis, and other non-Shia minority groups, with a particular focus on the regime’s crackdown on dissenters following a brief military escalation involving Israel and the United States.

“Following U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets in June 2025,” the report found, “the Iranian government dramatically escalated its crackdown on dissidents and religious minorities.” Other sources have indicated that authorities have executed a number of dissenters after sham trials, with one leading figure in the Iranian judicial system urging prosecutors to expedite trials and increase punishments for those brought to court on religiously motivated charges. Nearly 500 individuals were executed between January and May 2025, including some facing religiously based charges.

“The situation for Iranian people is more dangerous now than before the war,” Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview. “Unfortunately, I think the repression will intensify further in the coming days.”

The recent spate of arrests and executions follows a predictable pattern designed to suppress opposition. Victims are tortured, tried without independent legal counsel, and in some cases, executed.

On June 29, the Iranian government passed a bill imposing the death penalty for nearly any form of contact with hostile countries, including Israel. Many Iranian Christians and pro-democracy activists maintain contact and receive support from abroad due to extreme restrictions inside the country.

Analysts have expressed concern that the new law will be used further to justify Iran’s ongoing campaign of arrests and violence.

The USCIRF report also highlights the disproportionate impact of Iran’s religious repression on women and girls. Following the high-profile killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022, Iran’s religious police have once again tightened enforcement of religious regulations related to dress and public conduct. According to the report, Iran is beginning to use advanced surveillance technology to track and identify women who violate the compulsory hijab law.

Limited Options for Persecuted Minorities Seeking Asylum

The U.S. refugee program was halted effective January 22, 2025, and has not been reopened since that time, except to allow two small groups of white South Africans who were, according to administration officials, targeted for their race.

Previously, ethnic and religious minorities facing persecution could apply for refugee status. When the program was halted in January, some religious refugees who had already been approved to enter the U.S. were summarily sent back to refugee camps. In February, news broke about a group of Iranian converts to Christianity who were detained upon entering the U.S. and sent to Panama, presumptively for return to their home country, despite requesting asylum.

Refoulement, or the forced return of refugees and asylum seekers to countries where they are likely to face persecution, is clearly prohibited in numerous international treaty bodies, including the Convention against Torture and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED). The United States is a party to the Convention against Torture but has refused to sign the ICPPED.

Adherence to non-refoulement is, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “an implicit guarantee flowing from the obligations to respect, protect and fulfil human rights.”

An executive order published in June introduced near-total restrictions on travel to the U.S. by citizens of 12 countries around the world, including Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, and Myanmar — countries widely recognized as among the most violent violators of religious freedom in the world. Foreign government officials and their families, however, enjoy broad exemptions from the new policy.

Of the 12 countries whose citizens were banned, four are designated by the U.S. Department of State as Countries of Particular Concern for severe violations of religious freedom or are recommended for that designation by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Religious minorities in several of the remaining countries are known to experience harsh religious repression as a part of their daily lives as well.

Justifying the travel ban, the Trump administration cited broad national security concerns and frustration with the lack of cooperation by certain countries in vetting potential travelers to the U.S.

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