There are deportations, and then there is the part where the United States puts someone on a plane to a country they are not from, may never have visited, and in some cases have no meaningful connection to at all.
That second category is no longer some obscure corner of immigration policy. According to a major Washington Post investigation published Monday, the Trump administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to build a network of agreements with 31 countries willing to accept people deported from the United States even when those people are not citizens of the receiving country.
The scale is the part that turns this from a strange policy experiment into something much bigger. More than 25,000 people have been sent to third countries during Trump’s second term, according to data assembled by journalists and human-rights researchers for the wider Deportation Project. The overwhelming majority were sent to Mexico, but thousands of others have been moved through countries across Africa and Latin America.
And yes, some of the routes sound like somebody shuffled a deck of passports and airport codes.
The Post describes migrants from China, Russia, Iran and Afghanistan being sent to Costa Rica. Another flight carried people from Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and Jamaica to Eswatini, the small southern African kingdom formerly known as Swaziland. One Iranian Christian profiled by the Post was sent to Panama despite having no previous connection to the country.
The administration says there is a practical reason for all of this. Some governments will not take their nationals back. In other cases, migrants themselves may say they fear returning to their home countries. White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told the Post that third-country removals are used for people whose home countries will not accept them or for people with removal orders who have asked not to be sent home.
That explanation gets you to the beginning of the story. It does not explain the machinery that has grown around it.
According to internal government records reviewed by the Post, the administration has created what amounts to an international marketplace for deportation cooperation. The United States has offered direct payments to foreign governments and pledged large grants connected to refugee and infrastructure programs. The Post reported at least $81 million in direct payments to more than a dozen governments, along with $179 million pledged to the International Organization for Migration and $124 million to the U.N. Refugee Agency for projects connected to countries taking deportees.
People familiar with the deals described some of that funding to the Post as incentives designed to make third-country agreements more attractive.
The operation even has its own bureaucracy. A State Department unit called the Office of Remigration is helping negotiate the arrangements. Its leader, career State Department official Christian Ehrhardt, has traveled through Africa meeting with governments about accepting deportees. The Post reported that officials in the region have been told to treat him as more than a normal diplomat because he is carrying White House priorities directly into the negotiations.
This is where the story becomes much more than “Trump is deporting more people.” The administration is building an international network specifically designed to solve one of the biggest practical obstacles to mass deportation: what happens when the country you want to send someone to either will not take them or is not considered an available destination?
The answer appears to be: find another country.
The legal problem is that courts have increasingly questioned how the government is doing it. On September 18, a federal appeals court ruled that the administration’s third-country deportation policy was unlawful because migrants were not being given sufficient notice and an adequate chance to raise claims that they could face persecution or torture in the country selected for them.
That ruling matters because “third country” sounds bureaucratic until you picture the practical situation. A person may be told that the United States is not sending them to their homeland. It is sending them somewhere else entirely. If that person fears imprisonment, torture or persecution in the new destination, the legal fight is over whether they get a meaningful opportunity to object before the plane leaves.
The administration argues the policy is also a deterrent. The possibility that a migrant could be removed not simply to the country they came from but to an unfamiliar destination can make remaining in the United States less attractive. Administration officials have openly described deterrence as one of the goals of aggressive immigration enforcement.
There is also a remarkable institutional twist. The State Department bureau now involved in negotiating these agreements was historically focused heavily on refugees and humanitarian assistance. An administration official publicly described the bureau’s mission as having been fundamentally reoriented toward carrying out the president’s immigration agenda.
So a part of government traditionally associated with helping displaced people is now helping negotiate where deported people can be sent.
That is a very 2026 sentence.
None of this means every third-country removal is identical. Some receiving nations accept only particular nationalities. Some agreements cap the number of deportees. Some countries accept people with certain criminal records and reject others. The government has negotiated a patchwork rather than one universal system.
But taken together, the agreements show how far the administration is willing to go to keep deportations moving when the obvious destination is unavailable.
The $410 million figure is especially striking because much of this network was not visible to the public as it was being assembled. The Washington Post based its investigation on internal records, interviews and data gathered with international reporting partners. PBS FRONTLINE’s Deportation Project describes the broader investigation as a months-long collaboration involving 72 journalists from 24 news organizations across 15 countries.
That is a lot of reporting to uncover something the administration has been doing on a very large scale.
And the program is still only one piece of Trump’s broader deportation campaign. The Post notes that the Department of Homeland Security says nearly 985,000 deportations have been carried out during Trump’s second term. Third-country removals are a minority of that total, but they represent one of the most unusual and legally contested tools being used.
The policy question now is not simply whether the United States can deport someone. It is how much money Washington should spend persuading unrelated countries to take that person, what protections the deportee receives before being sent there, and what responsibility the United States retains afterward.
Because once a government can answer “Where are we sending them?” with “somewhere willing to take them,” immigration enforcement starts looking a lot different.
What do you think: should the United States be allowed to deport people to countries they have never lived in if their home country will not take them back?
