I’ve been asking myself — and other people who know more than I do — over and over again over the last eighteen months: is third-country deportations a spectacle, or is it for real?
This is, of course, a false dichotomy. For anyone who is deported to a third country, it is very real. At best, they are deposited unceremoniously in a country where they have no reason to stay; No one helping them to build a new life, no money or legal permission to necessarily travel anywhere else. At worst, they’re thrown into prison in a country where they have broken no law, or put on another plane to a home country where they will be persecuted or tortured.
But when we think about policy — and when I write this column — it’s always important to think about the overall scale of the phenomenon: how many people are getting sent to third countries, and how many people are not? How much should someone who has not yet been arrested — or who has been detained and is fighting their case — worry that a flight to, say, Eswatini could be in their future?
The answer keeps changing.
The use of third-country removals has flickered in and out of public attention since the U.S. struck a horrific deal with Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador to incarcerate and torture hundreds of Venezuelan men in the spring of 2025. Most recently though, a number of flights in late August — deporting everyone from Afghans to Venezuelans to eight African countries — have raised the spectre again.
Right now, I think it’s safe to say that the Trump administration is scaling up its use of third-country deportations, a tactic they could expand more in the coming months or years. But actual deportation flights to third countries are still less common than the threat of third-country removals, being used to intimidate immigrants into self-deporting of their own volition, or dropping their immigration court cases and accepting deportation to their home countries instead.
First of all, the term “third-country deportations” is often being used to refer to two things that are legally distinct, even though in practice they both entail putting someone on a plane to a country to which they have no ties. It encompasses both formal deportations — sending someone who has been ordered removed from the United States to a country that is their own — and expelling U.S. asylum seekers to other countries in which they, theoretically, could be able to apply for asylum instead.
The latter category is the result of “Asylum Cooperative Agreements”, signed between the U.S. and the designated country that’s agreeing to accept flights. The administration then uses these agreements to get immigration judges to “pretermit” (immediately dismiss) pending asylum cases on the logic that if the immigrant qualifies for asylum, the other country’s government will figure that out once they’re sent there. Then, the immigrant is detained until they are either removed to that third country or agree to give up and go home.
But there are reasons why some people with final orders of removal cannot be returned to their home countries.
Many people’s home countries do not accept any deportees directly from the United States (Iran comes to mind). But many more are specifically protected by the U.S. government from beingreturned to their home country, based on the likelihood of persecution or torture. This is known as withholding or deferral of removal, and it can be granted by an immigration judge when someone doesn’t qualify for asylum in the United States but is still making a compelling humanitarian claim. These cases used to be fairly rare — because most people whose claims were strong enough to qualify for deferral of removal also qualified for asylum under U.S. law. But during Trump’s first term, and then again under the Biden administration, restrictions on asylum eligibility for people who crossed into the U.S. without inspection meant that more people were granted withholding and deferral instead.
Traditionally, such people were essentially allowed to stay in the United States — indeed, they were usually given work permits. The federal government could have chosen to detain them instead, and try to find a country to deport them to, but it chose not to. The federal government didn’t make an active effort to find a country to deport them. This administration, however, does seem perfectly happy to keep someone in detention while they find a country that will take them in.
That’s especially problematic given that some countries to which the U.S. sends deportees — Ghana, for one — may ultimately send them back to their home countries anyway. That’s known as chain refoulement, and the UN claims it violates the Refugee Convention, but such arguments don’t tend to hold much water with this administration.
Again, though, the question has to be: is this worst-case scenario happening for most people who might be subjected to third-country removal?
The U.S. has set up the legal infrastructure for a pretty extensive global shell game: more than thirty agreements have been signed with other countries to accept deportees, rejected asylum-seekers, or both. But many of those agreements cap the number of people who can be sent to a given country at a few hundred a year. Even when there’s no explicit cap, countries still have to agree to receive each flight. As a result, only a few countries are regularly accepting third-country removal flights. (If you want to look into the details of any of this, I cannot more highly recommend the Third Country Deportation Watch website, operated by Human Rights First and Refugees International, which is regularly updated with information about agreements, flights and conditions in third countries.) The only country that has accepted more than 600 third-country deportees is Mexico, which has accepted more than 20,000 — many of them people caught crossing into the U.S. and summarily shoved back.
The Trump administration keeps running into the logistical limits of the “deportation” part of its “mass deportation” agenda. ICE arrests surged over the summer, but deportations did not — for reasons including a lack of available planes. Add in the additional complications involved in a third-country deportation, and one can quickly see a gap emerge between the number of people the administration might want to deport — or threaten to deport — to Eswatini, and the number of people it actually can.
Still, the threat of action is essential.
When asked about recent African third-country removal flights, DHS’ statement to CBS News was a variation on what’s become a standard response: if you don’t want this to happen to you, you should self-deport. “If an illegal alien chooses to file a claim in court refusing to go to their home country, we are required by law to find a safe and secure nation for them to go to. If an illegal alien chooses to go home, we will give them a free flight home and a $3,000 check.” (As we’ve recently addressed at the Throughline, that might not be an airtight guarantee.)
It does not take much imagination to understand that many people who have concerns about returning to their home countries may have even more concerns about being sent, sometimes to prison, in a country where they have never been. That doesn’t mean they’ll be safe in their home countries; it just means that some people may prefer to choose the danger they know over the one they don’t. And if those people accept deportation to their home countries — especially countries that regularly take deportation flights — that makes the administration’s job logistically much easier.
Essentially, the administration is wielding a double-edged sword. Third-country removals are real, and they’re terrifying — but the terror is itself a weapon to get people to accept leaving the U.S. under circumstances that are less unfamiliar but perhaps just as unsafe.
