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As President Donald Trump launches a deadly bombing campaign in Iran that has killed more than 1,800 people, his administration is continuing to antagonize Iranians living within the United States as part of his mass deportation campaign.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently announced that Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi, a 59-year-old Iranian man who has lived in the U.S. since 1991, died while in the agency’s custody. Najafabadi was incarcerated for nearly a year in a rural Louisiana prison despite suffering from chronic heart disease. He is one of dozens to die in ICE custody since Trump took office, as the administration insists on jailing people facing deportation orders, including refugees and longtime U.S. residents.
ICE reported the death on March 6, five days after Najafabadi passed away at a hospital in rural Mississippi and six days after Trump began his war on Iran. ICE policy requires deaths to be reported publicly within 48 hours, one of many standards observers say the agency appears to be systemically ignoring.
Democratic lawmakers, civil rights groups, people jailed by ICE, and their family members have all reported medical neglect and other abuses in jails run by the agency and its contractors for months now. Immigrant rights groups have said those waiting for immigration hearings should not be incarcerated in the first place — especially if they have health problems.
ICE noted Najafabadi’s history of blood infection and heart disease during an initial health screening when he was detained in April 2025. According to the agency’s statement upon his death, an immigration judge had previously ordered Najafabadi’s removal in 2014, but he was released on court supervision because officials could not deport him to Iran at the time.
ICE said Najafabadi received a second health screening for chronic illness on October 25, 2025 and a third on February 20, 2026, when staff transferred him to a specialty hospital outside of the prison. He died of heart failure nine days later. At least 11 people have died in ICE custody so far in 2026, and at least 32 died in 2025 as Trump’s crackdown ramped up. Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), said Najafabadi’s death is “deeply disturbing.”
“It is highly possible, if not likely, that the terrible conditions at ICE facilities played a role in Mr. Najafabadi’s declining conditions and death,” Costello said.
The Trump administration has revoked and suspended programs for refugees from countries around the world, including Iran, while making incarceration mandatory for people waiting to see an immigration judge. Bond or bail is not available, so immigration attorneys are filing a deluge of habeas corpus petitions that are overwhelming federal courts. As a result, the population of ICE’s network of jails and prison camps has exploded as lawmakers and families report outbreaks of disease and untimely deaths.
“We have received reports of deplorable conditions — including overcrowding, unsafe and unsanitary conditions — at ICE detention facilities, including those where [Najafabadi] was detained,” Costello told Truthout. “We know that some detained Iranians who did not face the prospect of retaliation from the Iranian government willingly chose deportation back to Iran in recent months rather than continue to be detained in such awful conditions.”
Like previous press releases on deaths in custody, ICE’s statement contains dehumanizing language about Najafabadi, claiming he “threw away his chance at the American dream.”
“The public deserves answers and accountability regarding how dehumanized foreign nationals are being treated by this out-of-control agency,” Costello said.
In a June 2025 poll of Iranian Americans conducted by NIAC, 54 percent said they did not think the U.S government takes their civil rights seriously compared to 38 percent who did. Costello said the results reflect a concern that bigotry against Iranians is being weaponized under Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
A series of racist executive orders issued by Trump places bans and restrictions on travelers from Iran and 38 other countries, including many Muslim majority countries, complicating avenues of escape for Iranian political dissidents and civilians living under U.S. and Israeli bombardment. The Department of Homeland Security also reversed longstanding policies that prioritized Iranian asylum claims to protect refugees and political dissidents from deportation.
“Right as the poll was conducted, the travel ban came into force, asylum was ripped up, refugee admissions have been dashed, and then there’s [been] this effort to round up Iranian Americans here in the United States for a very, very long time,” Costello told reporters on Wednesday. “They weren’t part of ‘sleeper cells,’ they are part of communities.”
Costello was referencing a number of recent media reports warning of Iran unleashing attacks by clandestine so-called “sleeper cells” living in the U.S. As Adam Johnson at The Real News Network points out, the “sleeper cell” narrative is as old as the “war on terror” launched by President George W. Bush in 2001, and is often pushed by anonymous leakers and pro-war lobbyists “whenever polls show increased skepticism or opposition to bombing people 6,500 miles away.” As Johnson notes, the claims are generally impossible to verify.
On September 29, 2025, a plane chartered by the U.S. deported 120 Iranians after the Trump administration struck a deal with Iran’s government to accept the deportees, in an extremely rare instance of cooperation with Tehran. As many as 400 Iranian nationals were initially identified for deportation in 2025, and more than 175 have been deported to Iran on three separate flights since September.
The third flight in early January removed an unknown number of people just weeks before Israeli and U.S. forces launched their joint war against Iran, according to reports. That flight followed weeks of protests and uprisings against the theocratic government of Iran. Security forces killed thousands of people during a brutal crackdown on dissent. Trump has repeatedly used the unrest to justify U.S. intervention.
“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” Trump said in a January 13 post on Truth Social, his social media website, without offering further details.
After U.S. and Israeli strikes on February 28 killed members of Iran’s top leadership, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Trump again called on the Iranian people to topple the government. However, Iran’s military and security forces continue to remain in control of the country. Meanwhile, the UN says up to 3.2 million people have been displaced in Iran as a result of the U.S.-Israeli attacks, which the Iranian Red Crescent says have targeted more than 21,000 civilian sites.
As airstrikes continue to pound the nation of more than 90 million people, it remains unclear whether the Trump administration can resume deportations under the previous agreement with Iran. Those still targeted for deportation include a woman who told NPR she was adopted by a U.S. soldier in the 1950s and has lived in the U.S. her entire life, and a gay couple who say they will face execution if they are returned to Iran.
The couple remains separated in federal custody after narrowly avoiding deportation flights back to Iran. The two men and a third Iranian claimed asylum at the southern border in January of 2025. The three originally planned to serve as witnesses for each other in asylum hearings but were detained and separated, according to the American Immigration Council. The group, which is now providing legal help, calls the couple “Ali and Adel” and is withholding their names due to fear of persecution.
All three asylum seekers say they faced abuse as children from family members, and persecution by Iran’s morality police as adults. The third Iranian national had a lawyer and was eventually released by a judge to pursue an asylum claim within the U.S., but Ali and Adel did not have legal representation and struggled to fight their cases from immigration jail.
“Without the witness of an attorney, immigration judges have essentially free rein over the proceedings,” Rebekah Wolf, an attorney at the American Immigration Council representing the Iranian asylum seekers, wrote in a January 30 post. “Review of the audio recording in Adel’s case is startling: the immigration judge made disparaging remarks about the abuse he faced on account of his sexual orientation, and misstated the legal standard that Adel had to meet. Ali reported similar treatment during his hearing.”
“If the U.S. position is that the Iranian regime is repressive and undemocratic, the fact that we negotiated with them over our migration policy is astonishing,” Wolf said, in a recent interview with El Pais. “The idea that the United States would consider Iran a safe place to send someone clashes with the political stance toward that country over the past decades.”
Ali and Adel now have legal counsel but continue to face an uphill battle. In the meantime, they remain in ICE custody, where conditions are allegedly so bad that other Iranians have chosen deportation instead, as Costello mentioned. According to Wolf, Ali and Adel do not have the option of returning to a country where their love is punishable by death.
“I wish we had found you sooner,” Wolf says Ali told his current attorney. “Please save our lives.”
Mike Ludwig is a staff reporter at Truthout based in New Orleans. He is also the writer and host of “Climate Front Lines,” a podcast about the people, places and ecosystems on the front lines of the climate crisis. Follow him on Twitter: @ludwig_mike.
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