The Deportation Flights to Iran
Between September 29, 2025 and January 27, 2026, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed more than a hundred Iranian nationals on three charter flights. Not one of those aircraft landed in Iran. Each flew to Qatar or Kuwait, handed the people aboard to a Qatari or Kuwaiti aircraft, and turned round. This page reconstructs the American half of all three from public transponder data: which aircraft, which airports, which hours, and where the signal goes missing.
| Departed | Aircraft | Type | From | Handover | Iranians aboard (reported) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 29, 2025 | N819AX | Boeing 777-200ER | Alexandria | Doha, Qatar | 54 |
| December 7, 2025 | N207AX | Boeing 767-200ER | Mesa | Kuwait City, Kuwait | about 50 |
| January 25, 2026 | N351AX | Boeing 767-300ER | Mesa | Kuwait City, Kuwait | not reported |
Passenger counts are from the reporting; everything else in this table is from the transponder data. Every time on this page is UTC, so a late-evening departure from the United States appears under the following date.
How to read this page
- Attributed claims come from published reporting and are marked as such. How many people were aboard, and what happened after each handover, are known only from those accounts.
- Measured claims are computed from the aircraft’s own transponder broadcasts — times, airports, distances, gaps.
- Candidates are neither. Where this page names an aircraft that no source has named — the legs into Iran — it is a match found by searching, is labelled unconfirmed, and is published with the checks that were run against it. Treat it as a lead, not a fact.
Even the measured half carries uncertainty worth stating. Public ADS-B coverage is built by volunteers and is thin over oceans and absent in places, so tracks have holes; where a hole matters it is shown rather than smoothed over. Airports are inferred from position, so an aircraft that goes quiet on approach is placed at the nearest field, which is not always the one it landed at. Every time here is UTC. Nothing on this page can show who was aboard any aircraft.
Why searching for flights to Iran finds nothing
The obvious way to look for a deportation flight to Iran is to search for aircraft landing at Iranian airports. It returns nothing. No US carrier flies to Iran, so each of these charters stopped short — in Doha or in Kuwait City — and the people aboard were walked onto a Qatari or Kuwaiti aircraft for the last leg into Tehran. The closest any of them came to an Iranian airport was 118 km. The American aircraft turned round and went home.
What is trackable is the American half: a wide-body charter leaving a US immigration staging airport, crossing the Atlantic, and landing in the Gulf. That is the part reconstructed below, from the transponder broadcasts of the three aircraft that flew it.
Flight 1: September 29, 2025 to October 1, 2025
N819AX · Boeing 777-200ER · Omni Air International · transponder ab2ae1
What the reporting says: Reported as departing the ICE staging facility at Alexandria, Louisiana with 54 Iranian nationals, refuelling in Puerto Rico and stopping in Cairo before Doha, where the deportees were moved onto a charter operated by the state-owned Qatar Airways.
What the transponder shows: N819AX flew 15,313 km in 19h 49m from the United States to Doha, Qatar. The nearest it came to an Iranian airport was 193 km, at its closest approach to Persian Gulf International Airport. The reporting places 54 Iranian nationals on board; the transponder can neither confirm nor contradict that.
Showing September 30, 2025. Open this day on ADS-B Exchange →
| Date (UTC) | Leg | Distance | Time | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 29, 202516:20 UTC → 18:34 UTC | BWI Baltimore, USA→ AEX Alexandria, USA | 1,735 km | 2h 14m | Positioning |
| September 30, 202503:23 UTC → 06:58 UTC | AEX Alexandria, USA→ SJU San Juan, Puerto Rico | 3,021 km | 3h 34m | |
| September 30, 202509:46 UTC → 02:01 UTC (Oct 1) | SJU San Juan, Puerto Rico→ DIA Doha, Qatar | 12,292 km | 16h 15m | |
| No signal for 4h 02m — last seen over open water, back at 37,000 ft over open water. | ||||
| No signal for 2h 45m — last seen over Egypt, back at 16,150 ft near Capital International Airport, Egypt. | ||||
| No signal for 1h 09m — last seen over Saudi Arabia, back at 37,125 ft over Saudi Arabia. | ||||
| Handover at Doha, Qatar — the deportees were moved onto a Qatar Airways charter for the flight to Tehran, around 11:00 local time on October 1. That aircraft is not this one, and that leg is not in this table: it comes from the reporting, not from ADS-B. | ||||
The Doha stop was not at Hamad International, which handles the city's commercial traffic. The 777 parked at Doha International (OTBD), the older airport a few kilometres to the north-west, and sat there for two hours and 49 minutes before leaving empty.
After the handover, it left Doha International Airport at 04:50 UTC on October 1, 2025 via Capital International Airport and Queen Alia International Airport, and was back on US soil at Alexandria International Airport on October 2, 2025.
On September 29, 2025, ERO conducted the first-ever chartered removal flight to Tehran, Iran for the removal of 54 Iranian nationals. This mission involved an ICE Air charter flight landing in Doha, Qatar, where the Iranians were transferred to a Qatar Airways plane for onward travel to Tehran, Iran.
Documented · from the released paperwork
The leg into Iran: named in the permit request
This is the one leg into Iran that does not have to be inferred. The landing-permit request Qatar Airways filed with Iran’s civil aviation authority is in the FOIA release, and the redactor left most of it intact.
- Operator
- Qatar Airways
- Aircraft named
- A7-BCJ, A7-BCV, A7-BCQ — “or substitute”
- Type
- Boeing 787-8
- Callsign, return leg
- QTR7313
- Route
- Doha International to Imam Khomeini in Tehran, returning to Hamad International
- Scheduled
- leaving Tehran at 06:35 UTC and back in Doha at 08:40 UTC on October 1
Qatar Airways asked ICE for the US aircraft's parking stand at Doha International because it planned a "tail to tail pax transfer" - the deportees walked from one aircraft to the other on the ramp. On the day, ICE told Qatar Airways the American charter was running about two hours late and the Qatari schedule moved with it.
Which of them actually flew
None of the three named aircraft can be seen at Tehran, and no Qatar Airways 787 came within 330 km of it that day. But one of the three did fly north into Iran and come back. A7-BCJ, the first aircraft on the permit, flew a five-hour round trip out of Doha that morning under the callsign QTR3250.
A7-BCJ was on the apron at Doha International directly alongside N819AX in the early hours of October 1, the two aircraft a few dozen metres apart - the "tail to tail" arrangement the emails describe.
| Time (UTC) | October 1, 2025 |
|---|---|
| 04:50Z | N819AX leaves Doha International, empty, for Amman |
| 05:19Z | A7-BCJ lifts off from Doha International and turns north |
| 05:59Z | last position: 38,000 ft, 39 km north of Shiraz, over central Iran |
| -- | three hours and twenty-five minutes with no position at all |
| 09:28Z | reappears at 39,000 ft in almost the same place, now heading south |
| 10:20Z | back on the ground at Doha International |
| 12:33Z | repositions the short hop to Hamad International |
The 3h 25m with no position
The gap is not explained by a lack of receivers. While A7-BCJ was silent at 38,000 ft, three other aircraft were being tracked around Tehran in the same hours - one of them down to 4,600 ft, which is far harder to receive than an aircraft at cruise. An aircraft that high is normally picked up hundreds of kilometres away.
What that leaves. The aircraft is identified; the landing at Tehran itself is not. Nothing was received between Shiraz and Shiraz, so the Tehran portion rests on the permit request, the reporting, and a five-hour round trip out of Doha with a hole in the middle of exactly the right shape.
Qatar Airways Network Operations, landing-permit request to the Civil Aviation Authority of the Islamic Republic of Iran, forwarded to ICE. FOIA release page 168.
Flight 2: December 7, 2025 to December 8, 2025
N207AX · Boeing 767-200ER · Omni Air International · transponder a1ac1a
What the reporting says: One charter carrying both Russian and Iranian nationals. The ICE Flight Monitor recorded it leaving Phoenix, Arizona; Russian nationals were handed over in Egypt and flown to Moscow, and about 50 Iranian nationals were moved onto a Kuwaiti charter in Kuwait City.
What the transponder shows: N207AX flew 14,925 km in 19h 42m from the United States to Kuwait City, Kuwait. The nearest it came to an Iranian airport was 118 km, at its closest approach to Abadan Ayatollah Jami International Airport. The reporting places 50 Iranian nationals on board; the transponder can neither confirm nor contradict that.
Showing December 8, 2025. Open this day on ADS-B Exchange →
| Date (UTC) | Leg | Distance | Time | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| December 7, 202509:01 UTC → 11:00 UTC | AFW Fort Worth, USA→ AZA Mesa, USA | 1,387 km | 1h 59m | Positioning |
| December 7, 202519:05 UTC → 22:37 UTC | AZA Mesa, USA→ BWI Baltimore, USA | 3,270 km | 3h 32m | |
| December 8, 202502:09 UTC → 18:19 UTC | BWI Baltimore, USA→ KWI Kuwait City, Kuwait | 11,655 km | 16h 10m | |
| No signal for 3h 21m — last seen over open water, back at 29,000 ft over open water. | ||||
| No signal for 4h 09m — last seen over Egypt, back at 26,600 ft near Capital International Airport, Egypt. | ||||
| Handover at Kuwait City, Kuwait — the deportees were moved onto a Kuwaiti charter for the flight to Tehran, at a time the reporting does not give. That aircraft is not this one, and that leg is not in this table: it comes from the reporting, not from ADS-B. | ||||
After the handover, it left Kuwait International Airport at 09:56 UTC on December 9, 2025 via Sofia Airport, and was last tracked near Maniitsoq Airport on December 9, 2025.
Searched · nothing found
The leg into Iran: looked for, not found
The same method that produced a candidate for the January flight was run here and came back empty. That is worth stating, because an empty result and an unexamined question look identical from the outside.
Every aircraft recorded around Kuwait International Airport in the hours after N207AX landed at 18:19 UTC on December 8, 2025 was checked — 105 of them. The 50 Kuwaiti-registered aircraft were checked across three full days (December 8, 2025, December 9, 2025, December 10, 2025); the rest across December 8, 2025 and December 9, 2025. None of them flew to Tehran. The closest any came afterwards was 94 km — 9K-CBI, a Jazeera Airways A320neo inbound from Baku, passing Tehran at cruise altitude.
Not one Iranian-registered aircraft appears in the capture at all, so nothing was sent from Tehran to collect them either.
Because the January search found its aircraft, and found it easily, this silence is unlikely to be a coverage problem: a Kuwait–Tehran flight is visible when it happens. The likeliest explanations are that the aircraft was not broadcasting, or that the people aboard did not leave Kuwait by air within those three days. Neither can be shown from ADS-B, and the page will not guess between them.
Flight 3: January 25, 2026 to January 26, 2026
N351AX · Boeing 767-300ER · Omni Air International · transponder a3e89a
What the reporting says: The same pattern as December: one charter out of Phoenix, Arizona carrying Iranians and Russians, a handover in Egypt for the Russian nationals, and a transfer to a Kuwaiti aircraft in Kuwait City for the Iranians.
What the transponder shows: N351AX flew 14,410 km in 17h 59m from the United States to Kuwait City, Kuwait. The nearest it came to an Iranian airport was 120 km, at its closest approach to Abadan Ayatollah Jami International Airport. The reporting places Iranian nationals on board; the transponder can neither confirm nor contradict that.
Showing January 26, 2026. Open this day on ADS-B Exchange →
| Date (UTC) | Leg | Distance | Time | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 25, 202614:41 UTC → 18:48 UTC | AZA Mesa, USA→ PSM Portsmouth, USA | 3,753 km | 4h 06m | |
| January 25, 202621:17 UTC → 11:10 UTC (Jan 26) | PSM Portsmouth, USA→ KWI Kuwait City, Kuwait | 10,657 km | 13h 53m | |
| No signal for 2h 36m — last seen over Egypt, back at 7,525 ft near Cairo International Airport, Egypt. | ||||
| No signal for 1h 18m — last seen over Egypt, back at 33,200 ft over Saudi Arabia. | ||||
| Handover at Kuwait City, Kuwait — the deportees were moved onto a Kuwaiti charter for the flight to Tehran, at a time the reporting does not give. That aircraft is not this one, and that leg is not in this table: it comes from the reporting, not from ADS-B. | ||||
After the handover, it left Kuwait International Airport at 05:39 UTC on January 27, 2026 via Sofia Airport, and was back on US soil at Portsmouth International Airport at Pease on January 27, 2026.
Unconfirmed · not established fact
The leg into Iran: one candidate aircraft
No source names the aircraft that flew this leg. Human Rights First describes the Iranians aboard the January flight as boarding "a Kuwaiti charter" at Kuwait City. It does not name an airline or an aircraft, and no other published account does either. What follows is not a finding reported by anyone. It is a match we went looking for in public transponder data, and it should be read that way.
One aircraft fits: 9K-AKQ, an Airbus A320neo operated by Kuwait Airways.
- It left Kuwait International Airport at 12:33 UTC — 1h 23m after N351AX landed at 11:10 UTC.
- Its last position we can trust is 13:43 UTC at 7,650 ft, 2.4 km from Mehrabad International Airport. After that the feed repeats a fixed coordinate, so the landing airport cannot be established from this data.
- It is recorded on the ground away from Kuwait at 14:36 UTC, and climbing again within minutes.
- It was back on the ground at Kuwait International Airport at 15:50 UTC — out and back, with no onward routing.
On the ground at Kuwait
The other half of the case is what happened on the ground. 9K-AKQ landed at Kuwait at 07:40 UTC and its transponder went quiet nine minutes later while it was still taxiing. When it came back on four and a half hours later it was about 1.4 km from where it had gone dark, 148 m from the point where N351AX had stopped, and already rolling. Nine minutes after that it left for Tehran.
That position is not simply the taxiway. Every aircraft that passed this stand during the December search - 108 of them - clusters on a transit route about 120 m from it, and those points sit a median of 227 m away from where 9K-AKQ powered up. It woke up on the apron, off the route everything else uses.
What makes it unusual
An aircraft flying to Tehran is only meaningful if it does not do so routinely. It does not, and neither did its fleet that day:
| Aircraft | Why it is here | Closest to Tehran | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9K-AKQ on January 24, 2026 | Same aircraft, earlier that week | 693 km | did not go |
| 9K-AKQ on January 25, 2026 | Same aircraft, earlier that week | 779 km | did not go |
| 9K-APJ | Fleetmate, same day | 762 km | did not go |
| 9K-AQC | Fleetmate, same day | 651 km | did not go |
| 9K-AQA | Fleetmate, same day | 719 km | did not go |
| 9K-AKL | Fleetmate, same day | 692 km | did not go |
| 9K-AQB | Fleetmate, same day | 761 km | did not go |
| 9K-AOL | Fleetmate, same day | 770 km | did not go |
| 9K-AKN | Fleetmate, same day | 692 km | did not go |
| 9K-APL | Fleetmate, same day | 779 km | did not go |
What this is not
It is not proof. A transponder reports where an aircraft went, never who was aboard, so nothing here shows that any deportee was on this aircraft. Nor were the two aircraft ever transmitting at the same moment: N351AX went quiet an hour before 9K-AKQ came back on, so their closeness is measured across that hour rather than observed, and neither aircraft’s actual parking spot is known because both stop broadcasting while still rolling. The match would be wrong if the flight was an unrelated charter, if a fleetmate outside the sample above also flew to Tehran that afternoon, or if the transfer aircraft was not Kuwait Airways at all. We publish it because the reasoning and the checks are visible and can be argued with, not because the question is closed.
What is still missing
The legs that actually reached Iran were flown by other aircraft, and no published account names any of them. September is now answered: the permit request names the operator and the aircraft, and A7-BCJ can be watched flying north into Iran and back with its position broadcast off in between. December and January are not.
One of the three now has a candidate aircraft, set out above under the January flight. It is a match found by searching rather than a fact anyone has reported, and it is labelled that way.
The handovers on October 1, 2025 and December 8, 2025 are still open. The method that produced the January candidate is the one being applied to them: capture every aircraft around the transfer airport in the hours after the American charter lands, then discard anything that flies the route routinely. What is left is either a short list or nothing.
It may not resolve. There are very few public ADS-B receivers inside Iran, so an aircraft on that route can stop being visible well short of Tehran — which is exactly what the January candidate does. Anything further that holds up will appear here, with the checks that were run against it.
What the redactions left behind
The emails were released to the National Iranian American Council as 285 pages of scanned images spanning May 13 to November 21, 2025 — no text layer, so nothing in them could be searched. Running the pages through a text recogniser makes them readable, and what emerges is a redaction that is not applied consistently.
What was withheld: Every tail number, callsign and aircraft type belonging to the American charters, along with each itinerary table, withheld under exemption (b)(7)(E) for law-enforcement techniques. An officer lists "Primary tail" and "Alternate tail numbers" and both are blacked out. Not one US registration survives anywhere in the 285 pages.
What was not: the same categories, elsewhere in the same release. Most of what this page can say about the leg into Iran comes from paperwork the redactor left open.
The Qatari flight plan, nearly intact page 168
The landing-permit request Qatar Airways filed with Iran's civil aviation authority names the operator, three candidate aircraft "or substitute", the return callsign QTR7313, the route and the date. The type and the outbound callsign are blacked out on the same page, a few lines apart.
ICE describing its own flight page 152
A summary written for senior staff survives in full, and it is the only place the government itself states that the Iranians were "transferred to a Qatar Airways plane for onward travel to Tehran".
How the handover was done page 163
Qatar Airways asks ICE for the US aircraft's parking stand because it is "planning to have tail to tail pax transfer", and says boarding will start an hour before departure at 0430 local in Doha. The deportees crossed the ramp from one aircraft to the other.
Who escorted them page 165
Thirty-five Qatari interior ministry staff flew Doha to Tehran and back, with Iran requiring a confirmed passenger list of them in advance. Officers of Lekhwiya, Qatar's internal security force, joined the charter and had to be briefed to hold valid entry rights for Iran. Qatar Airways notes it can only manage economy meals in plastic cutlery on the way out, but business meals on the way back.
The plan if Iran refused anyone page 167
The two governments arranged for the American aircraft to wait at Doha until the Qatari charter returned, "in case if any non-acceptance occur in IKA". Deportees who Tehran declined to admit would have been flown back to Qatar.
Names left standing page 156
Every name in the release is redacted except on two pages, where the ICE director and three senior officials appear in the headers of a June 2025 thread about how to start removing Iranians at all.
Contact details that also survived — airline operations addresses and a telephone number — are not reproduced here. They bear on nothing and publishing them would only invite nuisance. Nothing identifying any deportee appears in the release: the passenger manifest is referenced as a password-protected attachment and was not included. The full release is on DocumentCloud if you want to check any of this, and every page of it is searchable here — it was released as scanned images, so until now it could not be searched at all.
How this was put together
The reporting named the operator and the departure city for each flight but not the aircraft. Those two facts are enough. The FAA's public registry lists every US-registered aircraft together with the transponder address it broadcasts, which yields the operator's wide-body fleet — they are registered to its parent company's leasing arm rather than to the airline — and asking ADS-B Exchange for each of those addresses on the dates in question leaves one aircraft per flight that left the staging airport the reporting names and flew to the Gulf.
Every airport, time, distance and gap attributed to those three aircraft is then computed from their raw transponder traces. Two things are not: the number of people aboard and what happened after each handover. Neither is visible in ADS-B, and both are attributed to the reporting where they appear. Any aircraft named for a leg into Iran is a third thing again — an unconfirmed match, labelled as one wherever it appears.
The tracks are not continuous. Public ADS-B coverage depends on volunteers running receivers, and there are almost none over the mid Atlantic or over Egypt, so these three flights are missing 20h 09m of signal between leaving the United States and landing in the Gulf. Those holes are shown as holes. The Cairo stops in particular do not appear as landings at all — each aircraft goes dark approaching Egypt and comes back climbing away from Cairo two to four hours later, which is consistent with the stop the reporting describes but is not the same as having watched it happen.
How we know the aircraft is right
The identification was made before the emails were read, which makes what turned up in them a genuine check rather than a confirmation we went looking for. The September thread is titled “DRAFT ITINERARY V3 RON Jordan” — RON meaning remain overnight — and an ICE officer writes “Approved. Lets do the RON in Amman.” N819AX’s transponder has it landing at Amman and sitting there overnight before flying home, a detour nothing in the published reporting mentions and nobody would have predicted. The same thread has ICE chasing its broker — “CSI is calling Omni again” — and requesting landing permits for Egypt, Jordan and Qatar, which is the route the track flies.
The emails also show what is being withheld. An officer lists “Primary tail” and “Alternate tail numbers”, and both are blacked out under exemption (b)(7)(E), the law-enforcement one. So the registrations were circulating in writing; the government simply declined to release them. Everything on this page about which aircraft flew these missions was reconstructed without them.
Sources
- The Intercept, August 18, 2026 - "ICE Worked With Iran on Deportation Flights as Trump Laid Plans for War"
- Human Rights First, ICE Flight Monitor, December 2025 report
- Human Rights First, ICE Flight Monitor, January 2026 report
- The ICE emails themselves - 285 pages released to the National Iranian American Council, on DocumentCloud