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More than 22,000 people have been sent from the U.S. to at least 26 nations that aren't their own since February 2025, according to a tracker from the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.
- Panama and Costa Rica have become the system's two busiest transit points, together absorbing hundreds of deportees a month under agreements that remain largely undisclosed.
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A Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report found the administration paid at least $32.3 million to five governments — a fraction of the deals it has pursued with more than 50 countries overall.
A Removal System Built Outside Normal Channels
Since February 2025, Washington has leaned on a deportation strategy that sends people to countries where they hold no citizenship, no prior residency and often no shared language. According to the Third Country Deportations Tracker maintained by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), that approach has now reached more than 22,000 people across at least 26 countries. The organization built its count from government filings, court records and independent reporting from media and civil society groups.
USCRI's research also points to a risk that follows deportees once they land: exposure to torture, mistreatment or arbitrary detention in places with no obligation to protect them. What separates the U.S. version from similar schemes elsewhere, the group notes, is how little warning deportees typically receive and how few of them get a real chance to contest removal in court beforehand.
A broader accounting of the deal-making comes from News Americas, which reported this month that the administration has pursued this kind of arrangement with more than 50 governments in total. Most of those agreements have never been made public. What has surfaced, through a Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report released in February 2026, is that at least $32.3 million went to just five of those governments — spending Congress never specifically appropriated.
Panama's Bridge Role Begins
Panama was among the earliest partners, agreeing in February 2025 to serve as a stopover for migrants the U.S. found difficult to deport directly. Three charter flights landed in Panama City between February 12 and 15, 2025, carrying 299 people, according to Human Rights Watch. NPR reported that many in that first group came from Iran, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and China — nations the U.S. often struggles to deport people to directly — and were confined to a downtown hotel while Washington covered the cost.
A Senate Foreign Relations Committee letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, sent five months after those first flights, put the combined Panama-Costa Rica total for February 2025 at close to 500 people, many of them asylum seekers.
Panama's part in the system has since widened. In May 2026, the government introduced a Special and Temporary Transit Regime covering nationals of Spanish-speaking Latin American countries already included in repatriation-cooperation arrangements. Monitoring groups tracking country-level data put the number of non-Panamanian deportees moved through the country at roughly 360 by mid-2026, though Panama has not released the underlying agreement, which limits independent verification of the full total.
Costa Rica Turns a Pilot Into a Standing Pipeline
Costa Rica entered the system alongside Panama in February 2025, and its role has since become more structured. In March 2026, the government agreed to accept up to 25 deportees a week under a memorandum signed during a visit from Kristi Noem, the U.S. special envoy for the administration's "Shield of the Americas" initiative, as KSAT reported at the time.
That pipeline has kept expanding. By August 6, 2026, Costa Rica had taken in 331 third-country nationals under the new agreement, including more than 44 Brazilians, 66 Chinese nationals and 55 Colombians, according to country-level figures compiled by Third Country Deportation Watch, a joint project of Human Rights First and Refugees International.
Setting the Record Straight on Where Migrants Are Held
Two details often get blurred together in coverage of this pipeline, and it's worth separating them clearly. Reports of extreme heat, mosquitoes and scarce food and water describe the Temporary Attention Center for Migrants, known as CATEM, a facility near the Panamanian border where roughly 200 deportees were confined for weeks after the original February 2025 flights — not the weekly arrivals moving through Costa Rica today. Under the 2026 agreement, arriving groups are instead taken to a hotel near San José, where the International Organization for Migration assists them during their first week, according to OSV News. The harsh conditions documented by Refugees International at CATEM remain relevant to understanding what deportees who refuse repatriation can still face, since some of the 2025 arrivals spent months there, but they don't describe this year's flights.
That earlier CATEM episode is also the source of a figure that sometimes gets attached to the wrong country: after dozens of migrants from the original February 2025 group declined repatriation, it was Costa Rica — not Panama — that issued a special 90-day migratory status to 85 of them, covering 14 nationalities, according to NBC News. The decision, and the situation it resolved, played out entirely on Costa Rican soil.
Why Central America's Role Resonates With Latino Communities
For Latino families in the U.S. navigating mixed immigration status, these figures carry weight beyond the raw numbers. They document how Central American nations — with deep, long-standing ties to Latino communities north of the border — have become processing and holding points for migrants of entirely different nationalities, many with no connection to the region at all. Advocacy groups argue the true scale is likely larger than what's publicly known, since Panama and several other governments involved have declined to release the terms of their agreements.
