Banished by Bargain:
third Country deportation watch
Monitoring the human cost of
the U.S. government’s forced
third country transfer agreements
agreements signed with at least 35 countries
+25,000 people sent to 31 countries
+$81.5 million in U.S. government funding directly to other governments
The Trump administration has created an opaque web of formal bilateral agreements and behind-the-scenes deals that send asylum seekers, refugees, and other immigrants—with almost no warning and little chance to raise fears of persecution or torture—to countries with which they have no ties and where many are subject to grave human rights abuses including arbitrary detention or return to danger in the very countries they once fled.
The policy is one of the Trump administration’s most coercive tools to spread fear and punish people who have already been granted—or are seeking—legal protections in the United States. The agreements treat immigrants and refugees as bargaining chips, reflecting the Trump administration’s transactional and corrupt approach to foreign policy.
This tracker from Refugees International and Human Rights First shines a light on these U.S. third country transfer agreements, the political and financial motives behind them, and the harms they have caused—as well as relevant lawsuits and other efforts to challenge them.
For ICE flight tracking, visit ICE Flight Monitor on X and Bluesky
EXPLORE AGREEMENTS BY Region and Country
Africa
Burundi | Cameroon | Cabo Verde | Central African Republic
Democratic Republic of the Congo | Equatorial Guinea | Eswatini
Ghana | Guinea Bissau | Liberia | Libya | Rwanda
Sierra Leone | South Sudan | Uganda
Americas
Antigua and Barbuda | Bahamas | Belize | Costa Rica
Dominica | Dominican Republic | Ecuador | El Salvador
Grenada | Guatemala | Guyana | Honduras | Jamaica | Mexico
Panama | Paraguay | St. Kitts and Nevis | St. Lucia
Explore The Map
Tracking the Human Cost
Forced third country transfers have separated parents from children, spouses from one another, and cut people off from their communities in the United States. In many cases, they have resulted in enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, and unlawful refoulement (where people are sent to persecution in the country they fled, either directly or via third country). Many people transferred to third countries are left in limbo and precarity: lacking legal status, identity documents, or any way to provide for their most basic needs. The toll on individuals and family members is profound: mental anguish, uncertainty, and no safe path to reunification.
Beyond those already forcibly sent to third countries, tens of thousands of asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants in the United States have had their court proceedings thrown out without a hearing on their asylum claim or been arrested and subjected to prolonged detention because the U.S. government claims it intends to transfer them to third countries.
Methodology
Our methodology uses transparency requests, on-the-ground sources, and public reporting to determine the number of removed third-country nationals.
This tracker currently does not include deportations that involve a layover in a third country before onward transport to their country of origin, and where the third country has not agreed to process and accept them—for example, Iranians removed to Tehran via Qatar and Kuwait, Venezuelans removed to Caracas via Honduras, Russians removed to Moscow via Egypt, Ukrainians removed to Ukraine via Poland, and Somalis to Kenya.
The texts of agreements between the United States and other countries regarding the deportation of third country nationals have mostly been posted, long after they have been negotiated and signed, on a U.S. State Department website or in the U.S. federal register. The UC Berkeley Human Rights Center has collected these documents into a user-friendly reading room. On each of its country pages, Third Country Deportation Watch links to the documents there. The texts of the agreements with Bahamas, Guinea Bissau, Jamaica, Mexico, Moldova, Saint Lucia, and Uzbekistan remain undisclosed.
Though documents have not been made public about them, the arrangement between Mexico and the United States to receive third country nationals (about 20,000 from January 2025 through August 2026) and arrangements between the United States and several Latin American countries to receive Mexican nationals (about 3,000 from January 2025 through August 2026) are included on Third Country Deportation Watch.
*Third Country Deportation Watch does not track ad hoc forced third country transfers carried out on commercial flights.
What types of agreements and arrangements has the United States made with third countries?
Arrangements to incarcerate forcibly transferred people in prisons in El Salvador, Eswatini, and South Sudan until eventual onward transfer.
Arrangements for temporary transfer before onward return to home country with Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Panama, and Sierra Leone. In most instances, this has also included arbitrary detention.
“Asylum Cooperative Agreements” (ACA) or attempts at “safe third country agreements” (STCA) with Belize, Cabo Verde, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Liberia, Paraguay, and Uganda, where people transferred purportedly may pursue an asylum claim.
Other types of arrangements that may include detention, onward transfer, and/or remaining in the third country, such as with Mexico and Rwanda, and a new 2026 agreement with Costa Rica (following a separate 2025 agreement).
In some cases, there are multiple arrangements with the same third country. For instance, many of the countries that originally signed an Asylum Cooperative Agreement subsequently agreed to receive forcibly transferred third country nationals from the United States outside the parameters of the ACA or pursuant to another agreement, including Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Liberia.
*Given the lack of sufficient tracked transfers and treatment upon arrival, the arrangements with the following countries cannot yet be categorized: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Burundi, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Kosovo, Moldova, Palau, St. Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Uzbekistan.
Where have people been sent?
As of early September 2026, the Trump administration has used these deals to send over 25,000 third country nationals to at least 31 countries (Belize, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ghana, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Kosovo, Liberia, Mexico, Moldova, Palau, Panama, Paraguay, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, South Sudan, Uganda and Uzbekistan). It also attempted to send people to Libya in violation of a court order.
Most third countries have received only a few dozen people or fewer, on flights without a regular cadence. The vast majority of removals of third country nationals have been to Mexico, where approximately 20,000 people have been sent since January 20, 2025 (including thousands of people that the Trump administration has not acknowledged in its accounting to a federal court). A March 2026 agreement with Costa Rica provides for regular transfers of 25 people per week. Since June 2026, one flight a month has transferred third country nationals from the United States to the Central African Republic, except for in September, when a U.S. federal court ruled that such deportations were unlawful. Third country deportations to CAR resumed in October after the Supreme Court issued an emergency stay of the federal court’s ruling.
The administration has also entered into agreements with at least five other countries, including Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Cabo Verde, Grenada, and Guinea Bissau, where transfers have not yet occurred as far as is publicly known. Country pages for these agreements (with the exception of a Guinea Bissau page in progress) are included on this site. We will update this site with new country pages if additional agreements are signed.
The U.S. and Uruguay have also been negotiating an agreement which, like other agreements, has sparked opposition from politicians and civil society. Some countries, such as Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, have declined to sign agreements with the United States.
A separate project led by Human Rights First, ICE Flight Monitor, tracks U.S. removal flights, including those to third countries, to bring transparency to government operations that are often hidden from public view. ICE Flight Monitor tracks third country transfer flights in real time via Bluesky and X, and its monthly reports include a comprehensive list of all third country transfer flights with plane and flight information.
Why is the Trump administration doing this?
The administration’s policy punishes immigrants and asylum seekers and deprives them of their rights under U.S. law. Third country deportations are a part of the administration’s racist promotion of “re-migration.”
Under this policy, the U.S. government is disappearing people, including people who have lived in the United States for decades, to unknown locations before family members and lawyers can help them, sending them to face arbitrary detention, torture, chain refoulement, and other harms. The mistreatment in the third country is inflicted not for any crime committed there or in the United States, but because they were immigrants in the United States subjected to a forced transfer arrangement.
In addition to punishing immigrants subjected to the agreements, the administration wields the threat of forced transfers to terrify immigrant communities and force people to leave the United States, including by publicly warning: “If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.” A U.S. official stated to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “the point is that the Administration can threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere. The point is to scare people.” U.S. immigration officials also directly threaten detained immigrants with transfer to a third country in order to coerce them to relinquish their rights and abandon their immigration cases. In some cases, the U.S. government seems motivated to not only punish immigrants and terrify others, but perhaps also to pressure other governments into accepting the return of their own nationals.
The Trump administration is using third country deportation agreements to undermine refugee protection globally and undermine adherence of governments around the world to the obligation of non-refoulement (not to return people to persecution) in the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees and the Convention Against Torture. The administration has increasingly deported to third countries people in the United States determined by U.S. immigration judges to be refugees or in need of protection from torture and granted withholding or deferral of removal to their countries of origin. Many are then refouled onward to the countries from which they were granted protection from persecution and torture. Agreements with third countries often include boilerplate language about adherence to these international treaties, but are routinely violated. The agreements may continue to push other countries to violate their human rights commitments, further undermining the rule of law globally.
The administration is also using Asylum Cooperative Agreements (ACAs) as a pretext to “pretermit” thousands of pending asylum cases in immigration court, refusing to consider the applicants’ asylum claims and instead issuing removal orders to third countries. This tactic is being used to automatically deny people’s asylum cases irrespective of their claim and send some to third countries, while the vast majority of asylum seekers with pretermitted cases—tens of thousands of people—are left in limbo with a removal order and facing loss of their work permit, many subject to prolonged detention or at risk of being detained, without ever having had an opportunity to present their case. Pretermissions are discussed in more detail below.
As noted above, in 2026, the United States signed new, superseding third country deportation agreements with many of the same countries with which it initially signed ACAs, further indicating that the ACAs were simply a pretext to throw asylum cases out of immigration court.
Who is being sent to third countries through these deals?
The Trump administration has used these deals to banish to third countries men, women, children, and families, including pregnant people, individuals with medical or psychological vulnerabilities, and those granted legal protections by the United States. People who have been forcibly transferred from the United States under these arrangements have come from a wide range of countries across the globe. This tracker’s country pages specify the nationalities and number of people sent to each third country.
The administration has forcibly transferred asylum seekers and other migrants at various stages of their immigration case, including:
people arriving in the United States to seek asylum who are expelled without consideration of their claim.
people in the midst of their immigration court case who have not received a full hearing on their asylum claim or a decision from a judge.
people to whom U.S. immigration judges have granted protection, known as withholding of removal and Convention Against Torture (CAT) protection, due to likely torture or persecution in their home countries. This includes many people who would have been granted asylum but were not because of an unlawful regulation that has been struck down by a federal court.
people with final orders of removal for whom removal to the third country was never raised by the government.
Why would other countries agree?
Through forced third country transfer agreements, the Trump administration has warped U.S. international relations in service of its deportation agenda. In many cases, the reasons countries have agreed to receive third country nationals remain murky, often bound up in pressure and incentives from the Trump administration, as well as broader bilateral geopolitical and financial interests.At the time that many of these agreements were signed and implemented, the Trump administration imposed or threatened third countries with visa bans, deportation of their own nationals, tariffs, and other trade barriers, as detailed in the country sections. The Trump administration also has provided funding to some of the third countries, including for migration and border enforcement, defense, and condoned corruption, repression, and violations of human rights by governments in third countries.
Third Country Deportation Watch has tracked that the U.S. government has paid at least $49 million to third country governments in direct connection with the agreements (which does not include the costs of flights).
Other U.S. incentives are more indirect. Some deals seem to be tied to U.S. investment in mining or other sectors or support for public health or other aid, albeit more restricted and limited than the United States provided in the past given massive U.S. cuts in humanitarian aid since January 2025. The administration has also diverted State Department funding formerly devoted to support and services for refugees abroad to these deportation agreements. Indeed, the administration has made funding available to the UN Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration in countries with existing agreements so that they can work with immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers forcefully transferred there by the United States.
What legal challenges have been brought?
The administration has used a range of unlawful tactics to attempt to justify these transfers, some in unprecedented ways. In response to litigation filed by legal services organizations and immigrants, federal courts have repeatedly held the administration’s forced transfers to be unlawful. The administration has appealed some of these decisions and requested stays pending appeal. As a result, U.S. courts have in some cases temporarily paused the rulings, paving the way for the government to continue to forcibly transfer people to harm in third countries while litigation is ongoing. Even where court orders remain in effect, the Trump administration has carried out some forced transfers in direct violation of court orders that were in full force at the time.
The Trump administration has attempted to invoke various provisions in U.S. law to carry out forced transfers. It has implemented a systematic policy to deport to third countries people with final orders of removal and is increasingly using this policy to target people granted withholding of removal or protection under the Convention Against Torture. These include dozens of people denied asylum and granted withholding of removal solely due to a regulation that had been ruled unlawful by a federal court at the time that the U.S. government forcibly transferred them to third countries. These also include people granted protections by judges and released from detention after prevailing on a habeas claim, only to be re-arrested by ICE and removed to a third country. The administration’s policy, which denies people notice or an opportunity to raise a fear claim with respect to the third country, purportedly relies on a U.S. law provision governing countries to which people with final orders of removal may be removed. A federal district court and court of appeals have both struck down the policy as unlawful. The government, however, has sought and obtained stays of these decisions while the Supreme Court considers the case, and has continued to escalate its unlawful third-country removals in the meantime.
The administration has also invoked a U.S. law provision on safe third country agreements to enter into at least eight Asylum Cooperative Agreements (ACAs), under which the U.S. government forcibly sends people to third countries without a chance to have their asylum case considered in the United States. These ACAs do not meet the congressionally-mandated requirements for such agreements—namely that the asylum seeker is safe in the third country and has access to full and fair asylum procedures. Ongoing litigation challenges the regulation and associated agency guidance that provide the framework for these ACA removals, as well as the designation of the ACA countries as having full and fair asylum systems.
The administration has unlawfully invoked Constitutional authority to respond to an “invasion” to shut down access to asylum at the border and forcibly send people seeking asylum to Costa Rica and Panama. This policy also relied on a U.S. law provision on “suspension of entry” that was enacted long before codification of the Refugee Convention and its Protocol. A federal district court and court of appeals have both struck down the asylum shutdown policy as unlawful, but the court of appeal’s ruling has not yet taken effect and the government is appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court. The administration has also invoked a centuries-old wartime law (the Alien Enemies Act, 50 U.S.C. §§ 21-24) to send Venezuelans to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. A federal court ordered the United States to facilitate the return of people expelled to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act (which the government has appealed) and an appeals court is considering whether Trump administration officials can be held accountable for violating a federal judge’s order in carrying out the expulsions.
In addition to the litigation discussed above, attorneys have also had some success in individual cases, such as by opposing the government’s efforts to pretermit asylum cases under ACAs and successfully challenging forced third country transfers through habeas corpus petitions. Additional guidance for attorneys is included in the resources page of this site.
Lawyers and members of civil society in third countries have brought challenges in their courts and international and regional bodies regarding their governments’ treatment—including detention, refoulement, and other human rights violations—of those transferred by the United States to their counties. Politicians in third countries have demanded more transparency regarding the agreements and other governments have at times refused to sign third country agreements and denied requests for transfers from the Trump administration.
Members of the U.S. Congress and international bodies have condemned the unlawfulness of forced transfers and the lack of transparency around the agreements.
How is the administration using Asylum Cooperative Agreements to pretermit cases in immigration court?
Since the second half of 2025, attorneys for ICE have filed tens of thousands of motions in immigration court to pretermit asylum applications pursuant to Asylum Cooperative Agreements with one or multiple third countries. It is extremely difficult for an asylum seeker to contest the motion and make a case against removal to those countries, particularly if unrepresented. When a judge grants the motion, they refuse to consider an applicant’s asylum claim and instead issue a removal order to a third country.
On March 13, 2026, DHS directed ICE attorneys to halt filing new motions to pretermit asylum claims per the ACAs—but not to withdraw motions that were already pending. ICE attorneys continue to argue in support of pretermission motions and judges continue to pretermit cases, thus refusing to consider them on the merits, and to order asylum seekers removed to ACA countries. Third Country Deportation Watch has also received reports that ICE attorneys have resumed filing ACA-based pretermission motions in some cases.
The organization Mobile Pathways used publicly available Executive Office of Immigration Review data to track 32,422 pretermissions of individual asylum cases with an Asylum Cooperative Agreement country (Belize, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, or Uganda) listed as the first country of removal for non-nationals of those countries through August 2026. There have been 29 for Belize, 19,264 for Ecuador, 1,859 for Guatemala, 8,087 for Honduras, and 2,823 for Uganda.
As of August 2026, Third Country Deportation Watch estimates that just between 200 and 300 third country nationals have been actually removed under the Asylum Cooperative Agreements: over 121 to Ecuador, over 100 to Honduras, 8 to Uganda, and 8 to Belize; it is unclear if or how many transfers of third country nationals to Guatemala have been carried out pursuant to the ACA. Given the large discrepancy between granted pretermissions and actual deportations pursuant to the ACAs, pretermissions seem aimed to throw out from immigration court large numbers of asylum cases without consideration of the persecution or torture people fear, coerce people in need of protection to abandon their claims rather than face an order of removal to a third country, deter people from seeking protection in the United States, and put vulnerable people at risk of harm in U.S. detention or through removal to a third country.
How is the administration targeting people granted U.S. legal protections from persecution and torture?
The Trump administration has carried out a systematic effort to detain and deport people granted refugee and torture protection in the United States. U.S. immigration judges have granted these individuals withholding of removal or Convention Against Torture protection, which prohibits their deportation to their countries of origin because they are more likely than not to face persecution or torture there. Because these protection grants are accompanied by a removal order, the Trump administration is detaining and forcibly sending people to third countries, including people who have lived in the United States for years or decades. This systematic effort is unprecedented: previously, people with these court-ordered protection grants were largely able to live the rest of their lives in the United States after proving their case to an immigration judge.
The Trump administration has sent at least 310 individuals granted refugee or torture protection to Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ghana, Liberia, Mexico, Moldova, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, St. Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Uzbekistan. At least 45 people are LGBTQ. At least 114 people were then returned to their countries of origin, including people who fled anti-LGBTQ harms, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, religious persecution, and hereditary slavery—in many cases amounting to unlawful chain refoulement and violating purported diplomatic assurances provided by third countries. To carry out this large-scale deportation effort, the administration is systematically detaining people granted withholding and CAT protection for prolonged periods in ICE detention, where they endure life-threatening and abusive conditions and the psychological terror of not knowing when or where in the world they will be sent.
What are Forced third country transfers?
We are using this term to describe the deportation or expulsion of individuals from the United States to third countries where they are not citizens and to which they are forcibly sent, often exposing them to harm or the risk of chain refoulement. These transfers occur through various bilateral agreements and arrangements between the United States and other governments.
What are Enforced Disappearances?
The arrest, detention, abduction, or other deprivation of a person’s liberty by state agents—or by others with the state’s approval, support, or acquiescence—followed by a refusal to acknowledge the detention or by hiding the person’s fate or whereabouts. This places the person outside the protection of the law.
What is arbitrary detention?
Arbitrary detention is the deprivation of liberty that lacks a legal basis, such as conviction for a crime, or, even when tethered to a cause and authorized by law, is unreasonable or disproportionate and carried out without due process. Detention is considered arbitrary when individuals are detained without relation to their own actions, not promptly informed of the reasons for their detention, are denied access to judicial review or the ability to challenge its lawfulness, are held for prolonged or indefinite periods, or are detained in a discriminatory manner. Even where domestic law permits detention, it may still be arbitrary if it is unnecessary or lacks justification or adequate procedural safeguards.