Reporting snapshot · 11 November 2026 (Asia/Karachi). The flight turned back in the early hours of Tuesday, 10 November, in Arizona time, and the account reached Pakistan on Wednesday morning. Pakistan's foreign ministry has not published the terms of any transfer arrangement and declined to comment on the flight, and the explanation for the turn-back rests on a relative of one detainee and an unnamed US official; whether the government gave the judge the notice her order requires is not established by anything published.
A United States deportation flight carrying Iranian detainees bound for Iran turned around in midair before dawn on Tuesday in Arizona and landed back at the airport it had left, after Pakistan abruptly declined to accept the group, The New York Times reported. That is the first turn-back in a programme whose earlier flight was stopped in court, and the first reported refusal by Pakistan. The small charter aircraft had departed Mesa, Arizona, just before five in the morning local time with the passengers due to be transferred in Pakistan and then handed over to Iran. It came back down about half an hour later, and by Tuesday afternoon the detainees had been returned to the Arizona immigration detention facility where they were being held, the relative of one of them said.
Human Rights First, the Washington group that tracks ICE Air flights, said in a statement that the aircraft was a Talon private charter jet with a 17-person capacity, and that only a handful of the hundreds of flights it has recorded over the past year have turned around after departing. The same account gave a figure of at least nine people in the group, taken from the relative of one of the detainees.
Two further figures have been published for the same operation and cannot simply be merged with it. The Associated Press, through The Guardian, reported that at least a dozen Iranian detainees had been contacted over the preceding week and notified of an upcoming deportation flight to Iran through Pakistan. On the previous attempt, on Sunday, at least eight Iranians held in Arizona had boarded the plane before that flight was cancelled without explanation, Yasmine Chubin, the executive director of the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund, told The New York Times.
Two accounts, one official and one anonymous, explain the turn itself. A relative of a detainee said an Iranian official had told the family that Pakistan had declined to accept the group, and a US official confirmed the refusal on condition of anonymity, The New York Times reported. Pakistan’s foreign ministry declined to comment on the rebuffed flight, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. At a news conference on Friday, Sajjad Haider Khan, a spokesman for the foreign ministry, said the arrangement for the separate Afghan removals was “under consideration” and that Pakistan hoped a “mutually agreeable way forward” would be reached, The New York Times reported.
The order that governs these removals
The flight sits inside a case brought by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund against the Trump administration, filed this summer in the District of Columbia and assigned to Judge Ana C. Reyes. The docket in that case shows a filing as recent as 10 November. Court documents obtained by the Associated Press and reported by The Guardian showed that as recently as mid-October the administration said it had plans to deport the Iranians through an unnamed third country, though it was unclear when it intended to do so.
Judge Reyes ordered the government to give the court 24 hours’ notice of any finalised plans to deport Iranians to Iran or to any other country, and five days’ written notice before such a deportation was carried out. At a hearing on 15 October she told the government it was sending people “back to that region, facing what you and I and everyone who would ever think of this would know would be, at a minimum, a serious threat of certain death”, and the justice department’s Dimitar Georgiev-Remmel replied that the government was “executing lawful orders of removal”. He told the court no specific date had been set for any removal.
The defence group’s lawsuit also alleges that US immigration agencies shared confidential information about detainees’ asylum claims with the Iranian government. The New York Times reported that among the detainees are Christian converts, members of the LGBTQ+ community and political dissidents who took part in anti-government demonstrations in Iran in 2022. One of the detainees contacted by lawyers attempted suicide once he learned he might be returned to Iran, and two were moved across state lines to a detention centre in Texas, The Guardian reported.
How the passengers were told
The route runs through Washington. The Iranian Interest Section, which represents Iran through an unofficial presence at the Embassy of Pakistan and handles its consular affairs, contacted the detainees over the week before the flight and told them they would be removed to Iran through Pakistan, The Guardian reported, citing the defence group. The section did not respond to a request for comment from The New York Times.
The first attempt had already failed. On Sunday at least eight Iranians held in Arizona boarded the plane, and the flight was then cancelled without explanation, according to Chubin in The New York Times. Human Rights First recorded the flight as a Talon jet with a 17-person capacity, and the same tracking data show how rare such a reversal is: only a handful of the hundreds of ICE Air flights it has logged in the last year have turned around after departure.
The Afghan batch, and the pause on it
The Iranian flight was part of the same operation that has been running against Afghan detainees since the end of October. More than 150 Afghan immigrants were expected to be flown from Louisiana to Pakistan and then expelled to Afghanistan, with Pakistan overseeing their movement to the border, The Express Tribune reported on 1 November, citing US media reports that unnamed US officials had told the New York Times Pakistan would take the detainees in.
That plan was stopped by a different judge in a different court. On 3 November Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York barred the removal of Afghan nationals to Afghanistan or Pakistan for the week, and Geo News reported that the immigration agency’s deputy assistant director Christopher George told the court there were “no planned or confirmed chartered or commercial flights” for that week. AfghanEvac, the group representing former US allies, said on the same day that veterans, advocates, 66 members of Congress and thousands of Americans had stopped the flight.
Al Jazeera reported that Human Rights First had confirmed a flight carrying some of the Afghans from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Pakistan scheduled for that Tuesday, and that rights advocates expected the batch to Pakistan to include Iranians as well — small numbers of whom the administration has already sent to third countries for eventual return to Iran, in the middle of the war the United States is waging on the country. The same report put the scale of third-country removals at agreements with at least 35 countries and at least 25,000 people forcibly sent to third states, on a tally by Refugees International and Human Rights First.
Questions the refusal leaves open
Three things are unresolved. Whether the government gave Judge Reyes the notice her order requires before the aircraft took off is not established by anything published, and neither the homeland security department nor the foreign ministry has said. Whether another flight is scheduled is likewise unsaid, although The New York Times reported that the administration plans at least two operations this month to deport immigrants to countries with which it has no diplomatic relations — Afghanistan and Iran — using Pakistan as the point of transfer.
What remains clearest is what Pakistan has not done. No ministry has published the terms of any transit arrangement, the number of detainees it would accept, or what would happen to people on arrival. KhabarWire has followed the wider file: the Afghan deportation plan reported on 1 November and the order that halted it on 4 November. The US deportations via Pakistan hub follows the operation, the litigation and Islamabad’s position.
