This article originally appeared in the Middle East Forum on June 19, 2025.
Since 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered approximately 1,740Iranian nationals at the U.S.-Mexico border. While this number is minuscule in comparison to the number of encounters with immigrants from Latin American countries, it is an exponential increase from the 90 Iranian nationals encountered at U.S. land borders from 2000 to 2019.
The relatively low numbers of Iranian border-crossings have left policymakers with little awareness of the possible security risks associated with illegal Iranian migration. While many appear to be genuine humanitarian or economic migrants, Iranian illegal immigration patterns have unique characteristics that warrant greater scrutiny.Understanding these characteristics is important for determining how Iran is most likely to seek to exploit our immigration system for the purposes of infiltration if the United States and Iran enter open conflict.
The most troubling aspect of illegal Iranian migration is the continued existence of sophisticated Iranian passport forgery rings. Iranian-led forgery networks operate out of countries like Thailand and Brazil, and enable illegal crossings at airports around the world. According to my findings from fifteen notable case studies involving Iranian passport forgeries, Iranians traveling with forged documents tend to do so under the pretense of later claiming asylum.
However, there have been at least two cases of Iranian nationals using forged passports to carry out suspected terrorist activity. In 2019, two Iranians were caught in Argentina with forged Israeli passports around the anniversary of the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires by Hezbollah. In 2013, security personnel at the Israeli embassy in Katmandu apprehended an Iranian man obtaining a fake Israeli passport and accused of planning to carry out attacks on Israelis in Nepal.
Passport forgeries are the most likely and serious avenue through which Iran could infiltrate the U.S. immigration system. Fake passports allow Iranian operatives to get around the recently announced travel ban and the otherwise widespread restrictions on Iranians throughout the Western hemisphere. Iran’s history of passport forgeries shows a familiarity with this approach, and their tendency to choose Israel as the country of origin for their forgeries also allows them to create headaches for Israeli travelers who may have to face additional screening to ensure their documents are legitimate. The experience Iranian forgers have in Brazil is especially concerning given Brazil’s recent history as a staging ground for intelligence operations by other American adversaries such as Russia.
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