At least eight Iranian nationals were loaded onto a plane in Mesa, Arizona, on Sunday morning, November 8, for a deportation flight that was to carry them to the country of Georgia, then on to Pakistan, and from there to Iran — and then the flight was abruptly canceled without explanation, according to Ali Rahnama, an attorney with the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund who filed emergency motions on behalf of some of the detainees, as reported by the Associated Press on November 9. The detainees were moved back into detention, Rahnama said.
Source: Associated Press via Now Georgia
Sunday's boarding is the outcome of the plan this site reported on November 8, when the fund told a federal court in Washington that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had readied 11 named Iranians — 10 men and one woman — for a pre-dawn flight to Islamabad, Pakistan, via Georgia, with onward transfer to Iran set for Tuesday, November 10. The fund's overnight filing argued the plan breached a judge's advance-notice order. The Associated Press report is the first confirmation of what happened next: the flight was prepared, people were put on the plane, and the removal did not leave.
In a court filing on Sunday, the defense fund laid out what it had learned about the removal flight and argued that the administration may have violated the judge's directive to give advance notice of deportation plans. Later on Sunday, the government filed court documents in the case, but they were sealed and inaccessible to the public, the Associated Press reported.
The route: Mesa to Georgia, then Pakistan, then Iran
According to Rahnama, the eight detainees who boarded the flight on Sunday had been visited by a senior official with the Iranian Interests Section — the Iranian representative office inside Pakistan's embassy in Washington that handles consular affairs — and were told that the Iranian government would transport them from Pakistan to Iran. In the past week, roughly a dozen Iranian nationals in immigration detention said they were notified that they were scheduled for an upcoming deportation flight to Pakistan and then to Iran, according to numerous attorneys who have since confirmed those plans with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The judge's notice order the case now turns on
The case is before U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes in Washington. Reyes has not ruled on the lawsuit's core claims, but she ordered the U.S. government to give the court 24-hour notice of any finalized plans to deport Iranians to Iran or to any other country, and five days' written notice before any such deportation is carried out. The lawsuit, filed by the fund in July, alleges that the U.S. government illegally shared confidential information about Iranians seeking asylum in the United States with Iranian officials. In the litigation, at least a dozen Iranian detainees have said they were contacted by Iranian officials who had knowledge of sensitive information on their asylum claims.
The Department of Homeland Security did not confirm the flight. In a statement to the Associated Press on Sunday, DHS said ICE does not comment on “prospective removal operations, including flight schedules, passenger manifests, destinations, or individual case details,” and would not confirm future removal operations. “As promised, the Trump Administration is employing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history,” the statement said. Why Sunday's flight was canceled, and whether the court intervened, has not been explained by either side in public.
No public explanation has been given for the cancellation; the government's Sunday filing is sealed; the current whereabouts and detention status of each of the men taken off the plane have not been published; and no new flight date has been announced. Nothing in Sunday's reporting establishes that the removal plan has been abandoned rather than postponed.
Advocates: the consequences ‘could be irreversible’
The Iranian American Legal Defense Fund has called for a halt to the removal flights, saying in a news release that they would reportedly mark the first deportation of Iranians to Iran since the U.S.-Iran war began. The group's executive director, Yasmin Chubin, said in a statement on Sunday that it was difficult to comprehend why the U.S. would forcibly deport Iranians, including asylum seekers, to Iran amid ongoing military hostilities. The consequences of removal, Chubin said, “could be irreversible and individuals may face persecution, torture, or death.” At least one person who was part of the scuttled flight had volunteered to go back to Iran after nearly two years of detention, Rahnama said, out of desperation to leave what he described as inhumane imprisonment; it is not clear how many of the others may have volunteered to leave.
For immigrant communities watching removal practice closely — including Punjabi families in the United States with members in removal proceedings — this case is the working test of what a court's advance-notice order is worth in practice: whether a family and its lawyers learn of a removal flight days ahead, with time to file, or hours ahead, from a phone call. Sunday's sequence — a boarding, then a cancellation with no public explanation — is exactly the uncertainty those orders were written to prevent, the fund argues; DHS, for its part, says only that it is using all lawful options.
What happens next: the immediate step sits with Judge Reyes — whether she treats Sunday's filing as a breach of her notice order, unseals or responds to the government's sealed filing, or sets a hearing. The onward-to-Iran leg in the original plan was set for Tuesday, November 10, but that sequence depended on the Sunday flight that did not leave. Any new attempt to fly the group would restart the notice fight, and the fund's emergency motions remain the vehicle for it.