Iran said on Tuesday that 120 nationals being deported from the United States under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown will fly home this week.

“120 people should be deported and flown home over the next couple of days,” foreign ministry consular affairs official Hossein Noushabadi told the Tasnim news agency.

“The US immigration service has decided to deport around 400 Iranians currently in the United States, most of them after entering illegally.”

The New York Times reported that some 100 Iranians who had sought refuge in the United States were being deported to their homeland under an agreement between Washington and Tehran.

It said the rare deal between the longtime foes was the fruit of several months of negotiations.

Contacted by AFP, the US State Department did not immediately comment.

The newspaper said an aircraft chartered by the US authorities had left the southern state of Louisiana on Monday evening and was expected to land in Tehran later Tuesday after a stopover in the Gulf state of Qatar.

It said the deportations were “the most stark push yet by the Trump administration to deport migrants even to places with harsh human rights conditions”.

Earlier this year, the United States already deported a number of Iranians, many of them Christians, to the Central American countries of Costa Rica and Panama.

Britain plans to tighten the rules over how migrants can settle permanently by making applicants prove their value to society, including being able to speak a “high standard” of English, interior minister Shabana Mahmood said on Monday.

The plan is the latest government effort to dent the rising popularity of the populist Reform UK party, which has led the debate on tackling immigration and forced Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to toughen its policies.

Most migrants can currently apply for “indefinite leave to remain” after five years of living in Britain, a status that gives them the right to live permanently in the country.

In her first speech to the Labour Party conference as interior minister, Mahmood said the government is considering making changes so people will only qualify for this status if they pay social security contributions, have a clean criminal record, do not claim benefits, can speak English, and have a record of volunteering in their communities.

Right to settle must be earned

“Time spent in this country alone is not enough,” Mahmood said. “You must earn the right to live in this country.”

A consultation on the proposals will be launched later this year, she said, and this builds on the government’s earlier announcement that this standard qualifying period would be changed to a baseline of 10 years.

Mahmood said her plans mean some people who live in Britain for more than a decade could still be denied permission to permanently remain if they fail to meet new standards.

Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK, which is leading in opinion polls, said last week it was considering scrapping “indefinite leave to remain”, and replacing it with a five-year renewable work visa.

Starmer accused Reform on Sunday of planning a “racist policy” of mass deportations, although he clarified he did not think Reform supporters were racist.

Lawyers said the new requirements may discourage some people moving to Britain, and requiring people to volunteer would be hard to assess.

Mahmood told the conference she was willing to be unpopular to stop the arrival of tens of thousands of people on small boats from Europe.

“We will have to question some of the assumptions and legal constraints that have lasted for a generation and more,” she said. “Without control, we simply do not have the conditions in which our country can be open, tolerant and generous.”

Immigration has long been one of the most important issues for voters in Britain. Controlling the number of arrivals was a key factor in the 2016 vote to leave the European Union, yet net arrivals hit record levels after Britain left the bloc

• Mamdani leads Cuomo in polls, backed by endorsements and small donors.
• Cuomo’s campaign could gain from Adams’s exit, attracting business donors.
• Trump’s attacks on Mamdani may boost his appeal among New Yorkers.

NEW YORK: The decision by New York City Mayor Eric Adams to suspend his sputtering reelection bid is unlikely to slow the upstart candidacy of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, political analysts said on Monday.

Mamdani, a 33-year-old Uganda-born state assembly member, has polled well ahead of his main rival, former New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo, with five weeks to go before Election Day, and persistent attacks by President Donald Trump may only serve to burnish Mamdani’s image with New Yorkers opposed to the president’s policies.

Since he scored a stunning upset in the June primary to become the Democratic Party’s standard bearer in the November 4 general election, Mamdani’s candidacy has been on a roll, winning endorsements from party holdouts such as former Vice President Kamala Harris and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and a steady stream of financial backing from small donors.

Adams confirmed weeks of speculation on Sunday by announcing he was suspending his independent bid for a second term. He had decided against seeking the Democratic nomination in June.

His departure creates what is essentially a two-candidate race between Mamdani and Cuomo, a veteran of New York politics attempting to make a comeback after his 2021 resignation as governor amid sexual harassment allegations. Cuomo is running as an independent after his loss in the June Democratic primary.

Mamdani “is well ahead of Cuomo and something would have to dramatically change the narrative of the race for there to be a shift in the polling to suggest Mamdani could lose, and I don’t see that happening right now,” said Basil Smikle, political analyst and professor at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies.

Mamdani on Monday said he was not interested in commenting on what Adams’ departure meant for his campaign.

“A lot of the focus has been on the question of the impact it may have on Election Day, what it means for the horse race,” he told reporters at a campaign event in uptown Manhattan. “What it loses sight of is that for New Yorkers who are struggling to afford the most expensive city in the United States of America, nothing has changed.”

Before Sunday’s news, a Marist University poll showed Mamdani leading with 45% support, compared with around 24% for Cuomo. Adams, who withdrew too late to remove his name from the ballot, and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa trailed with 9% and 17%, respectively.

While no new polls have been conducted since Adams dropped out, a Marist poll released September 16 asked potential voters to consider that possibility. It showed Mamdani would receive the support of 46% of likely voters compared with 30% for Cuomo and 18% for Sliwa. That suggests the benefits to Cuomo from Adams’ departure would help the former governor, but not enough to narrow Mamdani’s lead significantly.

Trump attacks Mamdani again

Adams’ bid for reelection had been plagued from the start. 

Elected during the pandemic, his popularity withered amid a steady drumbeat of corruption allegations involving himself and his associates. He became the first sitting mayor in New York history to be indicted on federal bribery charges.

The mayor pleaded not guilty, but Trump’s Justice Department dropped the case, saying it interfered with the mayor’s ability to support the president’s aggressive deportation agenda. That angered many New Yorkers, who overwhelmingly say they oppose the president’s policies.

On Sunday, Trump welcomed the mayor’s move, saying it gave Cuomo a “much better chance” by concentrating the anti-Mamdani vote.

On Monday, Trump then reacted with another attack on Mamdani. In a social media post, he said Mamdani “needs the money from me, as President, in order to fulfill all of his FAKE Communist promises. He won’t be getting any of it, so what’s the point of voting for him?”

Christina Greer, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York, says such threats may backfire, giving an unintended boost to Mamdani.

“The president makes miscalculations,” she said. “The more he tries to meddle in this race, the more it highlights the fact that actually we do want this type of representation because there’s such a draconian backlash coming from Washington, DC.”

Mamdani maintained his solid edge on Cuomo in fund-raising over the summer, having collected some $15 million versus $9 million for the former governor on the strength of a record number of small donations, according to the most recent data, which included August disclosures.

To be sure, Cuomo’s campaign could benefit from Adams’ departure if donations pick up again from powerful business interests concerned about Mamdani’s progressive agenda, which focuses on affordability issues at the expense of wealthy New Yorkers.

Before the primary, big donors poured millions of dollars into the pro-Cuomo political action committee Fix the City, which operates independently of direct campaign funding.

“We have seen an uptick in interest from donors and supporters over the past 24 hours and will be working to maximise our resources to ensure that Andrew Cuomo is elected in November,” said a source familiar with the PAC’s planning but unauthorised to speak on the record.