Trump’s ‘cruel and lawless’ deportation scheme spent $44M sending 17,400 people to places they’ve never been, report finds
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 17,400 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.
