Some migrants can’t legally be sent home. So President Trump is deporting them to third countries.
What is a third-country deportation?
It’s the removal of a migrant or asylum seeker to a country with which he or she has no legal or personal ties. While only about 17,500 of the more than 800,000 people deported so far during President Trump’s second term have been sent to third countries, those removals are a key part of his immigration agenda. His administration has brokered transfer deals with at least 33 nations—most of them poor and corruptly run—and has paid at least $44 million to those countries in connection with the deportation agreements. The Department of Homeland Security argues the policy is needed to remove migrants who are “so uniquely barbaric that their own countries won’t take them back.” But most third-country deportees have no criminal record, and most have been granted some form of legal relief that bars the government from shipping them home, where they may face torture, persecution, or death. Some migrants have been removed suddenly from detention centers and flown to countries in Africa, Latin America, or Central Asia with abysmal human rights records. “They took us, they put us on a plane, and they chained us by our hands and feet,” said one Colombian deportee, who didn’t know until mid-flight that his destination was the Democratic Republic of Congo, an active war zone. The U.S., said Nicole Waddersheim of the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, “is doing enforced disappearances.”
Where are deportees being sent?
About 90% have been transferred to Mexico under a Biden-era agreement that let federal agents at the southern border turn back migrants during the 2021–23 immigration surge. But Trump has tried to speed up the pace of deportations by shipping migrants to any country that will take them. In February 2025, 200 people— including 81 children—from countries including Iran, Afghanistan, Angola, and China were flown on two planes to Costa Rica; many of those deported had tried to claim asylum in the U.S. Weeks later, Homeland Security shipped 261 mostly Venezuelan men to the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador; many reported being tortured and sexually assaulted at the facility. The administration paid El Salvador more than $4 million to hold the men, whom it accused on scant evidence of being gang members. After four months at CECOT, the Venezuelans were sent to their home country. The administration then began looking farther afield for third-country destinations, striking deals with countries including Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, and South Sudan.
Is this policy legal?
That’s being contested in federal court. The Immigration and Nationality Act outlines a procedure for third-country deportations, and in June 2025 the Supreme Court ruled the administration could deport migrants to countries other than their own without giving them a “meaningful opportunity” to raise fear-based claims of torture. The following month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said officers could “immediately” begin sending migrants to “alternative” countries, with as little as six hours’ notice. Other courts, though, have rejected the agency’s legal justifications for specific removals: A U.S. district judge last week ordered the Trump administration to return to the U.S. a 55-year-old Colombian asylum seeker with diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and hypothyroidism who was deported to Congo—even after the country refused to accept her because it couldn’t provide sufficient medical care. The plaintiff “meets the standard for irreparable harm,” said Judge Richard Leon, “up to and including death.”
What conditions do deportees face in third countries?
Some have described landing in tropical locations without receiving the appropriate vaccinations and then being locked up by local authorities. Those sent to Eswatini, Africa’s only absolute monarchy, were immediately ferried to a moldy, bug-infested maximum-security facility where, one Laotian migrant told his lawyer, he felt “like a caged animal.” At least two of 26 migrants sent to Cameroon contracted malaria, and journalists who have tried to contact them have had their phones and laptops confiscated. In Equatorial Guinea, deportees are held under armed guard at a remote hotel; some have contracted typhoid fever. Weeks after 11 deportees arrived in Ghana, 10 were driven to its border with Togo and told to cross over on foot. That was especially terrifying for two of the female deportees.
Why was that?
Because they were Togolese and had fled to the U.S. to escape the threat of genital mutilation and forced marriage. “In this country, nobody can help me,” said one of the women, who is now in hiding in Togo. U.S. law prohibits asylum seekers from being sent to their home country if their “life or freedom would be threatened.” But there’s no legal mechanism to stop a migrant from being deported to a third country, which then transfers them home. In November, 50 humanitarian parole recipients from Ukraine were flown to Poland and then escorted across the border to their wartorn homeland. One man on the plane “was a 36-year-old who came to America as a child 20 years ago,” said a deportee. “He hardly speaks any Ukrainian.”
Are more deportations in the works?
The Trump administration is drawing up plans to send 1,100 Afghan nationals currently housed at a U.S. military base in Qatar to Congo. The group includes former interpreters and special forces that fought alongside U.S. troops. Here in the U.S., more than 24,000 migrants have received third-country removal orders and are awaiting deportation. “It is a country I don’t know, I have no family there, I don’t speak their language,” said Bolivian asylum seeker José Yugar-Cruz, 37, who is set to be deported to Congo. “I keep thinking it’s a nightmare that I will wake up from.”
