The United States was set to deport hundreds of Iranian nationals, a senior official in Tehran said Tuesday, as the Trump administration takes new steps in its immigration crackdown.
U.S. authorities had “planned to deport about 400 Iranians currently living in the United States, most of whom entered illegally,” the Iranian foreign ministry’s director general for parliamentary affairs, Hossein Noushabadi, told the semiofficial Tasnim news agency.
“Out of this number 120 have been selected for deportation and will return to Iran within the next one or two days,” he added, attributing the deportation to the U.S.’ “new anti-immigration policy.”
The identities of the Iranians and their reasons for attempting to immigrate to the U.S. were not immediately clear. The U.S. has not acknowledged any deal and the State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said that “the Trump Administration is committed to fulfilling President Trump’s promise to carry out the largest mass deportation operation of illegal aliens in history, using all the tools at our disposal.”
The news was first reported by The New York Times.
The planned deportation marks a rare instance of cooperation between the U.S. and Iran, which faced new criticism this week for its human rights record as it cracks down after a wave of protests and conflict with Israel.
United Nations human rights experts said Monday they were appalled by a “dramatic escalation” in the number of executions in Iran, after more than 1,000 people were killed in the first nine months of 2025.
President Donald Trump came into office promising the largest mass deportation in U.S history, targeting the more than 10 million unauthorized migrants living in the United States.
However, his administration has struggled to increase deportation levels despite pursuing deals with a number of countries.
119 people of different nationalities were deported to Panama in February as part of an agreement between the Trump administration and the Central American nation.
The administration has also worked to send immigrants to third countries, or places where they don’t hail from and may never have been, in an effort to increase deportation numbers. That has resulted in a high-profile dispute over groups of Venezuelans sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. In July, eight men from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam were also sent from the U.S. to South Sudan and five immigrant detainees were sent to the small African nation of Eswatini.
NBC News is tracking immigration enforcement using ICE data both public and internal as well as data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
