An ICE flight operates out of King County International Airport, also known as Boeing Field, on Aug. 23, 2025, in Seattle.
Photo: Lindsey Wasson/AP
More than 25,000
people have had their lives upended and been forced into unfamiliar cultures, governments, and legal systems when the Department of Homeland Security deported them to so-called “third countries,” places where immigrants previously living in the United States have no connections and few rights — and where a deportation business booming under the second Trump administration finds its murky endpoints.
“The point is to scare people,” said one Trump administration official, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority
report
. “With countries like Palau or Eswatini, the point is that the Administration can threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere.”
As is the case for many tools of its cruelty, the Trump administration did not invent third-country removals — it refashioned them to serve its own excesses. In the past, the U.S. used the obscure administrative compromise for people who could prove they would face persecution or harm if returned to their home country yet did not meet other requirements for asylum. The U.S. had to meet humanitarian and legal obligations, such as ensuring third countries would not turn around and deport migrants
right back to their home countries
. It was a last-resort tool that still left people displaced from their homes and communities in service of the country’s arcane immigration laws. But the current Trump administration’s policy,
premised on agreements
with at least 35 countries, has been anything but humane.
Nor has it been particularly legal. After the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the third-country deportation scheme, DHS scheduled a
flight
to deport migrants involved in a class-action lawsuit challenging the policy to Burundi, Rwanda, and the Central African Republic. Despite a succes
