When 15 immigrants from Latin America boarded a deportation flight in shackles last month, they had no idea Donald Trump’s administration was sending them to the Congo.
Months earlier, 19 men were sent to the tiny land-locked African nation of Eswatini, the continent’s only absolute monarchy. Eight others were sent to South Sudan, where a dire humanitarian crisis fueled by warring parties has put millions of people on the brink of starvation.
They are among more than 17,500 immigrants forcibly transferred to at least 21 of these so-called third countries since Trump took office, according to a new report on the scale and impact of third-country removals from Human Rights First and Refugees International.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported nearly 300 people to Costa Rica in recent weeks, and hundreds of others have been sent to more than a dozen other far-flung, impoverished or war-torn nations — from Ghana to Uzbekistan — where they don’t have any claims of citizenship, family connections, clear legal protections or a path to getting out.
They end up in hotels, shelters and prisons, while cash-strapped foreign governments — including countries with records of human rights abuses — are handed millions of dollars through secret agreements with the Trump administration’s outsourced immigration detention system.
It’s a “cruel and lawless foreign policy that treats human lives as bargaining chips,” according to Uzra Zeya, president of Human Rights First and the former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.
Trump’s policy exposes deportees to arbitrary and indefinite detention and other harms, including refoulement, where foreign governments can end up deporting people back to the countries and conditions they fled in the first place.
The administration has pledged at least $44 million to more than 30 countries who have agreed to take deportees from the U.S., according to the report.
“The more than 30 countries pressured into these deals are not merely complicit — they are active partners in violating international law and eroding the norms that uphold it,” Zeya said.
The strategy has emerged as a key tool in the president’s campaign to arrest and deport millions of people from the U.S., which detains roughly 70,000 people marked for deportation on any given day.
The vast majority of third-country deportees so far have been sent to Mexico, while hundreds of others have been spread around 20 other nations where they have no ties.
The removals often happen quickly, indefinitely separating deportees from their families with little to no notice, only to later discover that their loved ones are imprisoned in a foreign country or sent to a place where they fear increased risks of violence, indefinite detention, or a return to the country they fled before arriving in the U.S.
In the past several months, the Trump administration has increasingly targeted immigrants who were granted protections from removal by immigration court judges after finding that they would likely face persecution or torture in their home countries.
But once deported to a third country, where court-ordered protections in the U.S. are not necessarily guaranteed, those governments can then try to return them to the places they fled.
Vulnerable deportees sent to third countries are at a “serious risk” for that process of “chain refoulement,” according to the report.
They may feel no choice but to return to their home country under pressure from third-country officials, coercion in the face of indefinite confinement, or fear that their life might be at risk, researchers found.
The Trump administration’s agreements appear designed to “instill fear across immigrant communities in the United States, pressuring individuals to abandon their legal claims, and to return to the very harm they fled,” the report states.
“These third-country deportation deals are undermining protection and humanitarianism globally and putting lives at risk,” according to Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk.
“This is a deliberate effort to undermine protection, coerce people to abandon their claims, and erode the foundations of the Refugee Convention and Convention Against Torture,” he said.
Last summer, ICE instructed officials that immigrants can be deported to countries other than their own with as little as six hours’ notice — or no notice at all.
That memo from ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons followed a Supreme Court decision that opened the door for ICE to send deportees to countries where they do not have citizenship, family or any other connections. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the high court was “rewarding lawlessness.”
Massachusetts District Judge Brian Murphy, who is overseeing a massive lawsuit against third-country removals, has repeatedly tried to restrain the administration. In February, he ordered the government to provide immigrants with “meaningful“ due process before sending them to countries they’ve never been to.
One month later, a federal appeals court blocked Murphy’s order, allowing Trump to continue third-country removals while a legal challenge continues.
Last year, the administration inked a $4.76 million agreement with El Salvador, where roughly 250 Venezuelan immigrants — mostly people seeking asylum in the U.S. with no criminal record — were sent on overnight military flights to a notorious mega-prison labeled a concentration camp and “tropical gulag” by human rights watchdogs.
Similar agreements followed.
Rwanda’s $7.5 million contract with the U.S. allows ICE to send up to 250 million people. Eswatini has agreed to accept up to 160 people under a $5.1 million agreement.
But several agreements aren’t public, despite requirements under the Case Zablocki Act that the text of all international agreements be disclosed to Congress within 60 days, the report notes.
Refugees International’s Konyndyk called the contracts “a gross misuse of U.S. taxpayer dollars” that is merely “paying rights-abusing governments to take in and send people granted protection in the United States back toward the dangers they fled.”
Members of Congress have also discovered that several deportees with final orders of removal to their home country ended up being sent to third countries instead — only for those governments to send them back where they came from.
“Instead, the Trump administration is often flying these migrants thousands of miles away on costly flights,” according to a February report from Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“As a result, the Trump administration has, in some cases, paid twice for migrants’ travel — once to remove them to a third country and then again to fly them to their home country,” the report found.
One current U.S. official told the committee that the administration “is sometimes paying the country to take people, flying them there and then paying to take them to their home country.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” the person said.
The Independent has requested comment from the Department of Homeland Security.
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