In late January, the Trump administration was planning a war in Iran, weighing possible airstrikes and staging aircraft carriers and other military ships in the region. Around that time, government officials deported 18 people to Iran, the last of them arriving just days before American and Israeli bombs began falling across the country.

These deportations were the latest in an aggressive campaign to deport Iranians from the United States, the first time in recent history the US government had done so in large numbers. In the 13 months of Donald Trump’s presidency leading up to the war, the United States deported more than 200 people to Iran, even as the state department decried human rights abuses by the Iranian government and warned US citizens not to travel there “for any reason”.

The US government deported more than 21,000 people to countries that the state department deemed too dangerous to visit, according to a Marshall Project analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by the Deportation Data Project from Trump’s inauguration through mid-March.

These countries included war zones such as Ukraine, nations with unstable governments in disarray such as Haiti and brutal dictatorships such as Myanmar – places where travelers may face terrorism, wrongful detention and kidnapping, among other potential dangers. The overwhelming majority of those deported had no criminal convictions. At least 600 were children.

ICE did not respond to repeated questions about how and when it deports people to countries the state department classifies as unsafe to visit.

Susan Akram, a law professor with Boston University’s International Human Rights Clinic, called the deportations “immoral and totally inhumane” and argued that they violate US and international laws.

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United States immigration law is complex and sometimes contradictory, but Akram and other legal experts point to international law that prohibits sending anyone seeking asylum to any country where their life or freedom is threatened; the United States adopted this law through the bipartisan 1980 Refugee Act. The ICE data does not track how many of the people deported to those countries had made asylum claims. US and international law also say that no one, regardless of immigration status, can be sent to a country where they may be tortured.

If the United States violates international law in the way it treats foreign nationals, it opens the door for other countries to treat US citizens the same way, Akram said.

Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and a resident fellow at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, said that anyone deported to one of these countries would have had multiple opportunities under US law to contest their deportation. If they were deported, he said, it was either because they didn’t fight their removal in immigration court, or they asked for protection and “a rather robust due process system” found it was not unsafe.

Since September, the US government has deported three planeloads of people to Iran, according to Human Rights First, a non-profit that tracks ICE deportation flights. Those on the planes included a Christian convert and a political dissident, both of whom human rights advocates warned were at risk of persecution in Iran.

The state department’s travel advisory system currently identifies 23 countries where US citizens should not go, though the number fluctuates as countries stabilize, descend into conflict or are struck by natural disasters. The advisories pointedly say that the system “describes the risks and recommended precautions for US citizens – not foreign nationals”.

Venezuela is one of the countries that, for years, the state department warned citizens not to visit. While the US government ranked it among the most dangerous countries in the world, the Trump administration deported more than 18,000 people there, the Marshall Project’s data analysis found. Around 200 of those were not Venezuelan citizens. The state department recently downgraded Venezuela’s status from “do not travel” to “reconsider travel”.

People were deported to Venezuela during the especially dangerous time immediately before and after the US raids to topple its government and oust Nicolás Maduro, the president, and his wife. According to ICE’s data, in the week before and the week after the invasion, the US deported more than 100 people there.

Venezuela was not safe before Maduro was deposed, and it’s not safe now, said Juan Pappier, the Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch, a non-profit organization that investigates human rights abuses.

“There are entire neighborhoods that are controlled by criminal gangs that set up the rules and then kill people who don’t follow their orders,” Pappier said. “Globally, there are many cases of transparent hypocrisy of the US, in the same breath labeling a country as dangerous, and at the same time sending deportees there.”

The countries that the state department has deemed most dangerous also largely overlap with a list of countries whose citizens qualify for temporary protected status. It is a system that Congress created to give foreign nationals a legal way to work and live in the United States while their country is not safe to return to.

The Trump administration has attempted to end Temporary Protected Status for at least nine countries, including Venezuela, Somalia, Haiti and Afghanistan. These places remain dangerous – the state department’s Haiti page, for example, warns of “kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited health care”. Removing the protection seems like a pretext to deport more people, said Jennifer Chacón, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies immigration. “It flies in the face of what [Temporary Protected Status] is supposed to do.”

More than 1,300 people were deported by the Trump administration to Haiti and hundreds more to Somalia and Afghanistan.

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Both Democrat and Republican administrations have elected to deport immigrants to countries in turmoil. During a period of heightened Haitian migration to the United States, the Biden administration deported tens of thousands of people to Haiti, despite unrest there.

At the time the state department had a “do not travel” warning for Haiti.

Many of the Trump administration’s changes to temporary protected status have been challenged in court and are tied up in litigation.

In hundreds of instances, the Trump administration deported people to countries with which it does not have diplomatic relations, including three people who, according to ICE’s data, were deported to North Korea. In the case of Iran, the deportations required a rare cooperation between the two governments, according to the New York Times.

“It just seems like a horrific policy,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council. The United States denounces the authoritarian and repressive Iranian regime, he said, “while also preparing to send people back to that very government – and also then into a war that the US was going to initiate”.

Data analysis by Aaron Sankin and Geoff Hing. Additional reporting by Lauren Villagran

* This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook