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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested hundreds of Iranian nationals during the U.S.’s June 2025 war on Iran, according to government data released to the National Iranian American Council under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) filed a FOIA request in October 2025 after reports revealed the U.S. had deported dozens of Iranian nationals — including some who could face threats from the Iranian government if sent back to Iran. ICE did not comply with the FOIA request until pressed to do so by a lawsuit.
The government data that was eventually released revealed that ICE “conducted a major surge of arrests of Iranians” during the June 2025 war on Iran, with 220 arrests in June and 80 in July of 2025.
The documents also revealed that in December 2025, 577 Iranians were being imprisoned in ICE jails across the U.S. The oldest of the Iranians in detention as of December was 77 years old, and the youngest was 5 years old, imprisoned in South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.
As of December, among the immigration jails with the largest number of Iranian detainees, Otay Mesa Detention Center in California held 54 Iranians, Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California held 52 Iranians, and the Dilley detention center in Texas held 47 Iranians. The Dilley detention center in Texas has faced scrutiny in recent weeks, with members of Congress visiting earlier this week and calling for its closure due to its harmful conditions for children, many of them under 5 years old.
NIAC said that the data shows that “many Iranians were arrested with little to no legal basis,” and that “legal challenges, when they have been possible, can succeed in securing relief.”
In comments to Truthout, Ryan Costello, policy director at NIAC, explained that, “The data disclosed by ICE shows a major spike in arrests of Iranians, particularly in the Los Angeles area, amid the June war. This is highly likely to be the result of a specific directive to discriminate against nationals of Iranian origin.”
“Many of those arrested at that time had a complication in their immigration status, such as a minor citation,” he continued. “NIAC has been heavily involved in seeking to connect vulnerable Iranians with lawyers. Legal defense is absolutely vital in these cases.”
The NIAC report also notes that over the past few weeks, during the latest U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, Iranian legal permanent residents in the U.S. have also had their green cards canceled by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Detained Iranians were also deported from the U.S., with 45 Iranians deported on September 30, 2025 alone. In an article for Truthout, Etan Mabourakh noted that the U.S.’s deportation flights since September 2025 have returned “Iranian dissidents and asylum seekers to Iran” and that the flights “were made possible through a deal struck directly with the Iranian government” despite the fact that Trump has described Iran’s government as “brutal” and “repressive.”
NIAC is currently working to obtain data regarding ICE arrests in 2026.
Though comprehensive numbers are not available on Iranians in ICE detention in 2026, individual cases have received some attention. Advocates have organized petitions and protests for Yousof Azizi, an Iranian PhD student detained in April and held at multiple ICE jails after speaking publicly about the latest war on Iran. In March, a 59-year-old Iranian, Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi, died in ICE custody.
The surge in detention of Iranians contradicts Trump’s claim to want “freedom” for the people of Iran. Instead, it confirms another pattern — that of the Trump administration pairing war abroad with ramped-up detention of immigrants in the U.S.
“Unfortunately the ‘help’ the President has often offered Iranians has been various forms of punishment: banning Iranians from securing visas, sanctioning them into poverty, arresting and deporting vulnerable individuals back to Iran and dropping thousands of bombs on the country,” said Costello. “The gap between rhetoric and reality only continues to deepen along with hostilities between the U.S. and Iran.”
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