Two gay Iranian men who fled their home country after being arrested for “homosexual acts” and facing possible execution are at risk of being deported by the United States as early as Sunday, their lawyers said, despite a federal court temporarily blocking one of the interventions. Advocates warn that the case exposes a deep breakdown in asylum protections.
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The men, both in their late 30s to early 40s, were arrested in Iran in 2021 by the country’s morality police on charges of what authorities called homosexual acts. The charges could range from flogging to the death penalty. They were released while awaiting sentencing, fled before they could be sentenced, and eventually headed to the United States to seek asylum, said Rebecca Wolf, a staff attorney with the American Immigration Council, who is representing them. Now, she said, the Trump administration is trying to send them back to Iran.
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“Those are textbook asylum cases,” Wolf said in an interview. defender on Saturday afternoon. “People in countries where they are criminalized for who they are and punished with torture and death. That is literally the definition of an asylum seeker.”
Homosexuality in Iran carries some of the harshest punishments in the world, ranging from flogging and torture to the death penalty. In 2022, human rights groups reported the execution of two gay men convicted of sodomy after years on death row, illustrating the real threat facing LGBTQ+ people.
After fleeing Iran, the men passed through Turkiye, which was also unsafe, and entered the United States at the southern border in January 2025 to apply for asylum, Wolf said. They arrived with a third LGBTQ+ woman, who was also detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The two remain in detention for more than a year.
The woman, who Wolf represented in her immigration case, was granted asylum after a brief 45-minute hearing. The government waived the right to appeal and the woman was released from custody. The man’s case unfolded very differently.
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The two had no legal representation at asylum hearings in late April and early May, Wolf said. These hearings were marred by bias and fundamental violations of due process, including negative and inappropriate language about what evidence LGBTQ+ asylum seekers should be able to present, she said.
“These are incredibly simple cases,” Wolf said. “But our immigration courts can be very biased when no one else, such as a lawyer, is watching.”
She said the contrast in results highlights the life-or-death consequences of navigating immigration court without a lawyer. “If we had caught these cases five months earlier, we would have been in a very different situation,” Wolf said.
At the time the men’s asylum applications were rejected, the United States had no diplomatic relations with Tehran, so no deportations were being made to Iran. Wolf said the situation changed in late summer when the government quietly restarted removal flights to Iran. Wolf said this is the third such flight since the fall.
The men were previously scheduled to be deported in September and December, but the deportations were canceled after negotiations with ICE. This time, the two were transferred from Fort Bliss Detention Center in El Paso, Texas, to southern Arizona, where a group of about 30 Iranians is being assembled for a deportation flight scheduled for Sunday.
Wolf said ICE’s position is that once an immigration judge issues a final deportation order, the agency is free to carry out deportations even while an appeal is pending. One of the men received a last-minute stay of deportation order from Colorado’s 10th Circuit Court of Appeals late Friday, temporarily blocking his deportation, Wolf said. The other man still has no such protection.
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“All ICE cares about is that there’s an order,” Wolf said. Such deletions were technically possible under the previous administration, but were rarely done while federal appeals were pending, she said. “It certainly wasn’t the norm like it is now.”
Human rights groups have warned that deporting the men would almost certainly put them in immediate danger. International watchdogs say Iran is one of more than a dozen countries that still execute people for homosexuality, and LGBTQ+ people there face widespread surveillance, arbitrary detention and violence.
Advocates also point to recent U.S. immigration cases involving LGBTQ+ asylum seekers as evidence of the government’s willingness to send gay people into harm’s way. In 2025, defender We detailed how Andry Hernández Romero, a Venezuelan makeup artist and openly gay asylum seeker, was deported under the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious Confinement Center for Terrorism (CECOT) despite having no criminal record and an inadequate asylum hearing. Hernández Romero spent more than four months in harsh detention conditions before he was finally released in a prisoner exchange. His case has become a rallying point for critics who say the administration is willing to ignore basic procedural protections, even when LGBTQ+ lives are at risk.
Kelly Robinson, director of the Human Rights Campaign, said: defender He said through a spokesperson that sending them back to Iran would be deliberately putting their lives at risk.
“Iran is one of 12 countries that still executes homosexuals, and sending them back to Iran would put them in immediate danger,” Robinson said. “But it makes sense for the Trump administration, which deploys ICE and puts the lives of our communities at risk every day. The same terror and brutality that killed Renee Nicole Good, imprisoned Andri Hernandez-Romero, and continues to force communities to live in fear. We join the American Immigration Council in demanding that these people be kept safe and calling on Congress to rein in this out-of-control regime.”
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The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin did not respond. defender’s Emailed questions asked for clarification on how authorities consider the risk of persecution or execution in such cases.
Wolf said political intervention remains one of the few remaining options if courts fail to act, but warned that even these informal safeguards are being eroded. Congressional offices have expressed alarm, but ICE retains discretion to proceed, she said.
“At the end of the day, ICE just makes the decision to take him off the plane,” Wolf said of the man, who has not yet received a court-ordered stay. “We hope that the court will be persuaded not to put my other client on that plane if the court does not order otherwise.”
Men are scared, she says. One person spoke English and called us multiple times when removal was imminent. “He’s saying, ‘Please, Mr. Wolf, please save my life,'” she said. One man is allowed to stay and the other is not, making the situation even more dire, raising the possibility that the couple will be separated, with one being deported to Iran and the other left behind.
Beyond the immediate danger, Wolf said, the case shows how unprepared even experienced immigration lawyers were for the current scale and intensity. Mr. Wolf has been involved in immigration policy for more than 20 years, and has worked as an asylum and detention attorney for more than 10 years. She said she practiced it during the first Trump administration, but what’s happening now is different in kind.
“I knew it was going to be bad,” she said. “But we had no idea how bad it would be.” She said of an administration that tested the boundaries of law and norms, identified where the cracks were, and “just bulldozed them over,” giving lawyers few tools to stop deportations even when there was a clear risk of death.
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What remains on the books often actually no longer exists, she says. Asylum remains the law of the land and only Congress can change it, but detention, speed and procedural barriers can effectively make asylum impossible.
“You can make access so intolerably impossible that it apparently ceases to exist,” Wolf said.
She warned that if the deportations proceed, the impact would extend far beyond this case. “The fact that this can happen to them means it can happen to anyone,” she said. The men also repeatedly said they came because they believed America was free and safe. “They’re asking, ‘Why can’t it stop?'”
So far, at least one federal court has intervened to answer this question. Whether the system will do the same for the other man, and whether the United States will choose to send same-sex couples back to countries where they can be executed for what they are, remains an open and urgent question.
At the time of publication, ICE had not announced whether the deportation flight would proceed as planned.
Source: Advocate.com – www.advocate.com
