What the Third-Country Deals Are Actually Buying

Fourteen men were flown to a military base at Bundase, in Ghana ^[1]. Eleven of them sued over the conditions they were held in; Ghana flew them out over a single weekend — a move their lawyers called an attempt to circumvent the lawsuit — and when the case reached U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, she found she had no jurisdiction over men already in Ghanaian custody. She added that the case suggested a "pattern" of the U.S. government evading its legal obligations ^[1]. The pattern is easiest to trace by function, not by month. Begin with whom the flights carry. In June, planes bound for the Central African Republic carried people who had already won withholding of removal in court — the protection that barred the government from returning them to the countries they had fled — among them an Iranian pro-democracy activist and a Christian convert ^[2]. The third country is how a removal finishes after a court has said it cannot. The substitution is now written into the docket itself. ICE attorneys have filed more than 8,000 motions asking judges to dismiss asylum cases without a hearing, on the ground that the applicant could seek protection in Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Uganda or Palau — countries the applicants have no ties to ^[3]. The third country is being offered in place of the hearing, not after it. Uganda's flights, under an agreement signed in August 2025, landed on precisely the population the courts had shielded: people with no criminal record who cannot be returned home ^[4]. The people moved through this system describe what it means once the plane lands. Pheap Rom, a Cambodian sent to Eswatini in October 2025, spent five months in a maximum-security prison before being repatriated ^[5].

They pulled into the dirt road and you see nothing but dirt road. I was like, oh, yeah, they’re definitely going to kill us and just dump us on this dirt road. — Pheap Rom

ICE's own paperwork states the sequence without embarrassment.

detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation, even as ICE faces a “historic number of injunctions” from courts stopping individual removals. — United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The injunctions are the obstacle; removal is the point. The Senate's audit does the arithmetic. Through January, the administration had spent more than $40 million to deport roughly 300 people to countries they had no ties to — lump-sum payments that average $1.1 million a head in Rwanda, and $7.5 million to Palau, which accepted no one ^[6]. The report's sharpest number undercuts the stated purpose: 80 percent of third-country deportees eventually returned to their home countries anyway, often on further U.S.-funded flights ^[6]. The money is the clearest statement of what is being bought. The destination was never the point; the removal was. The premise that home countries refuse to take back their own has a rebuttal from at least one of them: Jamaica's foreign minister says the government has never refused the return of any national ^[7]. And the deterrence argument has real numbers behind it — Gallup finds the desire to migrate to the United States at a 20-year low ^[8]. But that is a different product from the one the money describes. The fight has already moved past the courtroom. The government has ordered more than 13,000 asylum seekers deported to safe third countries like Ecuador and Honduras; fewer than 100 have actually moved, "due to aircraft limitations" ^[4]. The Justice Department frames the dispute as one about workability, not rights — a court order, it says, creates "an unworkable scheme" that impairs enforcement ^[9]. The visibility trail darkens in step. On September 15, ICE stopped listing the locations of roughly 30 percent of its 65,000-plus detainees — those with final deportation orders ^[10]. Apple pulled the apps communities used to track enforcement after federal pressure ^[11]. And an investigation found ICE targeted journalists to keep the secretive agreements from being exposed; journalists investigating a state-run deportee compound in Cameroon were arrested and detained ^[12]. The bargain is now the transatlantic norm. Hungary — fined a million euros a day by the European Union for breaching asylum obligations — has watched the rest of the continent adopt the model it spent a decade defending ^[13].

We feel vindicated not only because of what's going on in other countries in Europe. This is of course also a sign that we took the right path 10 years ago, that now we see most of the countries are doing what we have been doing for the past 10 years. — János Bóka

Brussels is preparing to host Taliban officials to negotiate Afghan deportations, even though it does not recognize their government ^[14]. The countries doing the receiving have learned what they hold. Eswatini initially asked for $500 million to detain five men ^[7]. Libya, paid for years to stop boats, is now assessed by European diplomats as possibly weaponizing the flow it is paid to control, tied to an energy memorandum in disputed waters south of Crete ^[15]. The one bench that has actually moved is not an American one. Eswatini's Supreme Court ordered in April that deportees held nine months without charge be given access to a local lawyer ^[16]. That is what the record shows so far — not a trend, a first signal. The question the U.S. courts dropped now has to be asked where the planes land.