ecuador

Background and Developments (last updated September 4, 2026)

Transfers to Ecuador of non-Ecuadorians under the Asylum Cooperative Agreement (ACA) began in mid-January, with approximately 121 individuals reportedly transferred through June 2026: 66 Venezuelans, 30 Cubans, 11 Hondurans, 9 Colombians, and the rest from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia and Peru. All U.S. removal flights to Ecuador, including those carrying third country nationals sent under the ACA, arrive in Guayaquil, one of the most violent cities in the Americas according to the State Department. Upon arrival, third country nationals are reportedly brought to a shelter where food and accommodations are provided by the UNHCR. They are reportedly allowed to stay in the country until their asylum claims are processed, though they face insecurity, precarity, and capacity constraints discussed below. 

Ecuador and the United States secretly signed the agreement in July 2025. On September 1, 2025, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister announced that the country was considering receiving from the United States asylum seekers of certain nationalities on a “case-by-case” basis, with discussions centering on an annual cap of 300 individuals per year. U.S. officials, by contrast, have emphasized that there is “no specific quota” in the agreement. Diplomatic notes dated July 16 and July 23, 2025 regarding the agreement between the United States and Ecuador were published in the U.S. Federal Register on November 17, 2025. The notes did not provide specific information about the terms of the agreement, and stated that another instrument would define eligibility criteria for transfers. Nationalities that could be subjected to the agreement are unknown. 

Though only 121 third country nationals have reportedly been removed from the U.S. to Ecuador pursuant to the ACA through June 2026, the Trump administration used the existence of an ACA to have immigration judges pre-termit the asylum cases of and designate for removal to Ecuador 18,552 people from over thirty countries between December 2025 and June 2026 according to immigration court data analyzed from Mobile Pathways. The largest numbers of pretermissions pursuant to the ACA with Ecuador have been for nationals of Colombia (2,386), Cuba (1,816), El Salvador (825), Guatemala (1,800), Honduras (1,354), Mexico (2,861), Nicaragua (1,547), Peru (1,055), and Venezuela (4,565). In August 2026, Refugees International spoke to several attorneys whose clients were pretermitted pursuant to the ACA with Ecuador and have been detained by ICE for prolonged periods without attempts to effectuate their removal.

An ACA is an agreement where the United States bars asylum seekers from applying for U.S. asylum and sends them to a third country to apply for protection there. U.S. law governing “safe third country” agreements provides that asylum seekers cannot be sent to third countries for assessment of their asylum claims unless they would be safe from persecution and have access to full and fair asylum procedures. The agreement with Ecuador is the subject of litigation in U.S. federal court inU.T. v. Bondi, which challenges the legality of several aspects of the ACAs purportedly entered into under the safe third country provision of U.S. law. This includes a 2019 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) interim final rule purporting to authorize the ACAs (ratified by DHS in 2025), DHS guidance implementing them, and designations finding that countries with which the United States has ACAs provide access to a “full and fair” asylum system. The current and former Trump administrations have repeatedly entered into ACAs with countries that do not meet safe third country requirements. U.T. v. Bondi began as a challenge to ACAs during the first Trump administration as U.T. v. Barr.

As is the case with several other countries with which the United States signed an ACA, Ecuador subsequently signed a second third country national deportation agreement. In that agreement, signed on May 2026, the  government of Ecuador agreed “to provide appropriate migratory processing for the transfer of third country nationals to their country of origin, residence, or other destination.” This raises concerns of chain refoulement, should the United States transfer to Ecuador people who have been found likely to be persecuted in their home countries (and despite Ecuador’s assurance in the agreement that “third country nationals removed to Ecuador would not be…further transferred to any country in which they would be subjected to persecution.”) 

The two agreements between the United States and Ecuador have been part of broader negotiations between the two countries. The first agreement was discussed during U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Ecuador in early September 2025, when Washington pledged $20 million dollars in security assistance to the country. An anonymous State Department official cited in various outlets insisted that “it was not a quid pro quo for the asylum deal and was not tied to a specific number of asylum seekers.” The following day, President Trump signed an executive order offering Ecuador potential relief from new tariffs in exchange for “meaningful” trade and security commitments. In September 2025, Secretary of State Rubio suggested that a free trade agreement with Ecuador was possible. On November 14, 2025, the United States and Ecuador announced a new reciprocal trade agreement designed mostly to increase U.S. exports to Ecuador but also giving “Most Favored Nation (MFN)-tariff treatment” to Ecuador for certain qualifying goods that cannot be grown, mined, or naturally produced in the United States. The United States remains Ecuador’s largest trading partner, giving the negotiations clear economic and political weight. Following a visit by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Noem to Ecuador, the United States initiated a “short-term” deployment of U.S. Air Force to combat drug trafficking in December 2025 at an Ecuadorian military base, despite Ecuadorian voters having recently rejected a referendum authorizing foreign military presence. In March 2026, the United States and Ecuador launched joint military operations in Ecuador against “designated terrorist organizations.” Also that month, when the number of pretermissions pursuant to the ACA with Ecuador spiked, the U.S. and Ecuadorian governments signed an agreement on reciprocal trade (to reduce tariff and nontariff barriers to trade and to increase national security alignment by cooperating on investment security and export control measures).Since the spring of 2026, U.S. military assets have continued to flow into Ecuador and the two countries have conducted regular joint operations against “narocoterrorists.”

Despite Ecuador’s long history as a host country for displaced populations, since early 2024 Ecuador has faced a surge in organized crime and escalating violence so severe that President Noboa declared the country to be in a state of “armed conflict.” A program implemented from 2022 to 2024 to regularize the status of tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants has been suspended amid shifting policies, even as new regional displacement pressures mount. This deterioration in security and increasing violence has in turn prompted an increase in internal displacement within Ecuador and outward migration by Ecuadorians themselves. Ecuador’s asylum system is more developed than some other asylum systems in the region but it remains under strain and backlogged. The potential of asylum seekers sent from the United States raises questions about the capacity of Ecuador’s asylum system and the risks facing those expelled there given the insecurity. In October 2025, Ecuador reformed its Organic Law on Human Mobility to make it more difficult for migrants to gain full access to education, formal employment, or health services. As of June 2026, UNHCR in Ecuador, which provides crucial support to the Ecuadoran asylum system, was only 16 percent funded even though asylum claims from Colombians and Venezuelans were increasing along with insecurity and cost of living in the country. Over 50 percent of asylum seekers in Ecuador surveyed by UNHCR lacked access to food and housing.