A few minutes after midnight on Tuesday, September 30, the New York Times published a breaking news story about a flight in the air on its way from Louisiana to Tehran, the capital city of Iran. Citing U.S. and Iranian officials, the story indicated that the chartered flight took off late Monday and would stop briefly in Qatar before reaching its final destination on Tuesday. While the exact makeup of the deportees is unclear as of this publication, there has been an uptick in Iranian asylum seekers in recent years, many of them seeking protection from religious persecution.