WASHINGTON — Lawyers for Iranian nationals held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have told a federal court in Washington that the Trump administration prepared to remove 11 Iranians — 10 men and one woman — on a pre-dawn flight on Sunday, November 8, in what the lawyers call an apparent violation of a judge's order requiring advance notice before any Iranian is removed. The overnight filing, a 'notice of apparent violation,' does not establish whether the flight took off, and as of Sunday afternoon it was not clear whether the court had intervened.
Source: Politico reporting (Kyle Cheney), via Raw Story / Opera News
This is a new development in a case Awaaz Punjab reported on November 5, when unsealed court filings showed the administration had held talks with Tehran about deportations during the war and U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes had imposed notice requirements on any removal of Iranians. Sunday's filing is the first test of those requirements: the lawyers say they learned of a finalized, imminent flight only on Saturday evening — hours before departure — through the U.S.-citizen wife of one of the detainees.
Source: Anadolu Agency, via Hatha Alyoum English
What the filing says the plan was
Quoting the filing, Anadolu reported: 'Plaintiff learned on the evening of Saturday, November 7, 2026… that ICE will remove eleven Iranian nationals — ten men and one woman — from the United States at approximately 4:00 a.m. on Sunday, November 8, 2026, on a flight to Islamabad, Pakistan, with a refueling stop in Georgia (the country) and onward transfer to the Islamic Republic of Iran on Tuesday, November 10.' The detainees had been issued 15-day temporary visas to Pakistan, the filing states. Pakistan, on this account, was a transit point, not the destination: the onward leg to Iran was to follow two days later.
Source: Iranian American Legal Defense Fund emergency filing, quoted by Anadolu
How the plan surfaced: a flight list shown inside a detention facility
According to the filing, the plan came to light through the U.S.-citizen wife of one detainee. She told the attorneys her husband learned the details in person on Friday, when an official of the Iranian government met with him and six other detained men at a detention facility in Arizona, 'announced the schedule, and, on request, showed him the flight list bearing his name and the names of ten other Iranian nationals.' The husband has been in ICE custody since October 2025, the filing says; he was moved from Georgia to Louisiana on October 28 and then to Arizona on November 1 — a sequence of transfers in the week before the planned flight.
The order the lawyers say was breached
The lawsuit is Iranian American Legal Defense Fund v. Rubio, in federal district court in Washington, before Judge Reyes. On October 15, Reyes ordered the government to notify the court within 24 hours of finalizing any plan to remove Iranians to Iran — including via third countries where Iran would later coordinate onward travel — and to give the court five business days' written advance notice before removing any Iranian individual. The October hearing produced the exchange that defined the case: asked whether the United States would send people back facing, in the judge's words, 'at a minimum, a serious threat of certain death,' Justice Department attorney Dimitar Georgiev-Remmel answered, 'Yes, your honor. The government is executing lawful orders of removal.' The sealed order and six sealed docket entries were made public on November 5 after the Justice Department withdrew its request to keep them secret.
Source: Case record analysis, Ash Talks (court filings, IALDF v. Rubio, No. 1:26-cv-02375)
Measured against that order, the lawyers' complaint is about timing, and it is specific: a flight finalized for 4 a.m. Sunday, learned of by the plaintiffs on Saturday evening, leaves neither five business days of advance notice nor, on their account, a timely 24-hour notice of a finalized plan. That is an allegation in a court filing, not a judicial finding — the government had not, in the reporting available Sunday, filed its response, and Reyes has not ruled on the notice. Politico's Kyle Cheney, who flagged the filing, noted it 'follows a similar planned flight of Afghan nationals stopped last week by a court.'
Source: Politico reporting (Kyle Cheney), via Raw Story / Opera News
The wider case behind one flight
The underlying lawsuit, filed July 7, 2026, with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, alleges that ICE shared confidential asylum information about Iranian detainees with the Iranian Interests Section — the office in Pakistan's embassy in Washington that handles Iran's consular affairs — and that the coordination produced at least three deportation flights to Iran, in September 2025, December 2025 and January 2026, carrying more than 100 Iranians in total. The Department of Homeland Security has denied the core allegation, telling CNN in July: 'These allegations that ICE shared asylum application records with the Iranian government are FALSE.' Sunday's filing does not by itself prove the wider claim; it tests the narrower, already-decided question of whether the notice order is being obeyed.
Source: Case record analysis, Ash Talks; DHS denial via CNN as quoted there
Whether the 4 a.m. flight departed; whether Judge Reyes or another judge intervened overnight; where the 11 named detainees are now; and what the Justice Department says in response to the apparent-violation notice. None of those questions was answered in the reporting available when this story was filed, and Awaaz Punjab is not treating the removal as having happened.
What happens next — and why it reaches beyond 11 people
The immediate next step sits with Judge Reyes: whether she treats the filing as a breach of her October 15 order, orders the government to account for the 11 detainees' whereabouts, or sets a hearing. The onward transfer date in the filing — Tuesday, November 10 — is the second deadline in the sequence, if the first flight went ahead. For Iranian asylum seekers in ICE custody and their families — and for the wider immigrant communities, including Punjabi families with members in removal proceedings, who watch these notice fights closely — the case is the working test of a simple proposition: that a court's advance-notice order means a family and its lawyers learn of a removal flight days ahead, with time to file, not hours ahead, from a spouse's phone call. Awaaz Punjab will follow the government's response and any order from the court.