More than 22,000 people have been deported from the United States to countries that are not their own since January 2025, according to advocates and researchers who track the practice, in what they describe as an unprecedented expansion of so-called third-country removals under President Donald Trump.
The figure comes from Third Country Deportation Watch, which reports that deportees have been sent to at least 26 nations since the start of 2025. The vast majority, roughly 18,000, were accepted by Mexico, with far smaller numbers spread across countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and Central Asia. The group’s own tracker lists a somewhat higher Mexico total of about 19,000.
Third-country removal sends a deportee to a nation other than their homeland, often a place where the person has no family, no history and, in many cases, has never set foot.
The mechanism is not new. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, immigration authorities may send a noncitizen to a third country when returning them to their country of origin is deemed impracticable, inadvisable or impossible, and earlier administrations used it on a limited basis.
What has changed, according to Violeta Chapin, associate dean and director of the immigration clinic at Colorado Law, is the scale. She told 9News that the administration is using third-country removals aggressively to expel people who cannot be returned to their birth countries. “We’re seeing it at a rate that I’ve never witnessed before,” she said. The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the practice to continue in June 2025, lifting a federal judge’s order in Boston that had required the government to give deportees advance notice before removal.
Andrea Loya, executive director of the Denver-area nonprofit Casa de Paz, said her organization began noticing the pattern roughly 15 months ago.
She said the removals have most often affected transgender women held in detention in Colorado who had previously been granted protection under the Convention Against Torture, after showing a judge their lives would be at risk in their home countries. Deportees, she said, are frequently left without money, contacts, or the local language, and in some cases have been directed to under-resourced regions far from major cities, including areas near borders that make any attempt to return harder. Loya also said the threat of removal to an unfamiliar country appears intended to pressure people into accepting voluntary departure rather than continuing to fight their cases.
Chapin said financial incentives help drive the arrangements, estimating that the U.S. government has directed about $44 million toward the effort. Independent analysts have described the policy in similar terms. The Migration Policy Institute, which counted deportation agreements with 27 governments and planned outreach to dozens more, has characterized third-country removals as a small share of overall deportations that functions more as a deterrent than as a mass-removal tool, since most receiving countries have agreed to take only a few hundred people at most.
U.S. and international law bar returning people to countries where they are likely to face persecution or torture, a principle known as non-refoulement.
Chapin said evidence shows the administration has not complied with those protections in some cases. Advocates have pointed to instances such as a group flown to Cameroon, most of whom had been granted judicial protection against removal to their home countries, and a group of congressional Democrats has asked federal watchdogs to investigate the removals.
The administration has defended the policy. Border czar Tom Homan has said that when countries refuse to take back their nationals, and those people cannot remain in the United States, the government finds another country willing to receive them. The Department of Homeland Security has described some of those deported as people with criminal records whose home nations would not accept them; one flight to the southern African nation of Eswatini carried deportees the agency characterized in those terms.
The Caribbean figures in the practice on both sides. Dominica and St. Kitts and Nevis are among the nations that have received third-country deportees, and the Bahamas and St. Vincent and the Grenadines have continued negotiating after initially declining. Caribbean nationals have also been among those flown to distant countries: the Eswatini flight included men from Jamaica and Cuba, alongside deportees from Vietnam, Laos and Yemen.
The number of destination countries and the pace of removals have continued to grow through 2026, even as the practice faces court challenges and calls for oversight.
https://ctninfo.com/?p=44231&preview=true
Source: https://www.9news.com
