A federal appeals court ruled Friday that immigrants facing deportation to a country other than their homeland must be given real notice of where they are being sent and a genuine chance to object before they are put on a plane, a rebuke of one of the Trump administration’s most contested enforcement tactics, though not the sweeping defeat it may first appear.
A unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston largely upheld a lower-court finding that the Department of Homeland Security’s fast-track “third-country” removal process violates federal law when people are given little or no warning, according to CBS News and ABC News. Under the policy, DHS could send a deportee to a nation that had offered the State Department blanket assurances it would not persecute or torture arrivals — and could do so, in some cases, without telling the person where the plane was headed.
“An individual’s right to contest removal to a country based on a fear of persecution in that country means little if one does not receive prior notice of the intended removal destination and a meaningful opportunity to contest that destination,” wrote Circuit Judge Seth Aframe, according to ABC News. Aframe, a Biden appointee, was joined by Judge Lara Montecalvo, also a Biden appointee, and Jeffrey Howard, appointed by President George W. Bush.
But the ruling was narrower than a flat prohibition.
The court did not find third-country deportations unlawful; it focused on process—the notice and hearing a person is owed before removal. The panel also trimmed part of the lower court’s order, throwing out a requirement that DHS first try to send people to their home country or another previously designated destination, finding the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to press that claim, as CBS News and PJ Media reported. The practical effect was not immediate: DHS General Counsel James Percival said on X that the policy “continues” because the ruling “is not currently in effect,” reflecting the case’s long and unsettled path through the courts.
That path has been winding. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy of Massachusetts declared the policy unlawful in February; the Supreme Court had earlier, in June 2025, paused an initial order over the dissent of its three liberal justices, letting removals resume while the litigation continued. Friday’s decision is the appeals court’s ruling on the substance — one round in a fight almost certain to return to the Supreme Court.
The human stakes are what have drawn the most attention.
The class-action case, brought by groups including the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, grew out of accounts of people flown thousands of miles to places they had never seen. ABC News has reported on a group of Latin American men deported to the Central African Republic who said they were not told where they were going until hours into the flight. “I feel kidnapped,” one of them, Aristides Fernandez Garcia, told the network. “They have violated all the rights that exist in life, because we are human beings.” Trina Realmuto, who leads the litigation alliance, said the court had made clear the government “cannot evade protections against persecution and torture by simply changing the deportation destination.”
In recent months, the administration has widened the practice, striking arrangements with dozens of governments to accept people who are not their citizens; advocates count formal deals with roughly 35 countries, among them Liberia, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic. Savi Arvey, director of policy for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First, said the government has spent close to $50 million on the agreements and accused it of “complete disregard for due process, for international law and for human dignity” by sending people to nations where, she said, they have been arbitrarily detained and exposed to persecution.
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