Iran announced on Tuesday that 120 nationals being deported from the United States under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown will return home this week.
“120 people should be deported and flown home over the next couple of days,” said Hossein Noushabadi, a foreign ministry consular affairs official, in comments to the Tasnim news agency.
According to Noushabadi, the US immigration service has decided to deport around 400 Iranians currently in the United States, most of whom entered illegally.
The New York Times reported that about 100 Iranians who had sought refuge in the US were being deported under an agreement between Washington and Tehran, following months of negotiations.
An aircraft chartered by US authorities reportedly left Louisiana on Monday evening, with a stopover in Qatar before heading to Tehran. The paper described the move as “the most stark push yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants even to places with harsh human rights conditions.”
Earlier this year, the US deported several Iranians, many of them Christians, to Costa Rica and Panama.
The US State Department has not yet commented on the deportations.
