The U.S. government has now sent more than 21,000 people to at least 24 countries under a growing web of “third country” deportation deals — arrangements that remove people not to their own home country, but to whichever nation the U.S. has paid, pressured, or negotiated into taking them instead.
WHAT’S ACTUALLY IN THESE DEALS, AND WHAT THE COURTS SAID ABOUT THEM
A Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report, released this February, laid out the financial architecture in stark terms: the U.S. secretly agreed to pay Rwanda a $7.5 million upfront payment to accept deportees, part of a broader pattern the report itself titled “At What Cost.” These deals routinely involve people with no citizenship connection whatsoever to the receiving country, no shared language, no family ties, and — in country after country on this list — governments with documented authoritarian or human-rights-abusing track records: Rwanda, Eswatini, South Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, Uganda.
A federal court actually ruled on the underlying legal question directly. In the case D.V.D. v. DHS, the court found DHS’s third-country removal policy unlawful, holding the government cannot send someone under a final removal order to a country never designated in their original proceedings without giving them meaningful notice and a real opportunity to raise a fear-of-persecution or torture claim. That ruling should have stopped the practice. Instead, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction pending further review — and with that stay in place, DHS resumed sending people to Ghana specifically without notice and without any chance to raise a fear claim, exploiting the exact legal gap the lower court had already found unlawful.
GHANA: THE DETAILS ON THE GROUND
The Third Country Deportation Watch project has documented specific, individual cases that show what this actually looks like for real people. One woman’s wrists and ankles were shackled for the flight; once in Ghana, she was held in a hotel for six days, and when officials tried to force her onto a bus toward Sierra Leone, she was dragged along the floor and injured. At least eleven men were detained at Dema camp — a detention facility inside a Ghanaian military training camp in a remote area outside Accra — where they were exposed to heat, mosquitoes, and unsanitary water, with no reliable power or running water and limited ability to contact family or attorneys. One woman held there was so terrified of being sent onward to her actual home country, where she believed she would be killed, that she attempted suicide and was hospitalized.
This isn’t a policy failure in the abstract — Ghana’s own foreign minister had initially promised the transferred West Africans access to “safe haven.” Instead, Ghana went on to deport many of them to their home countries or yet other third countries anyway. Ghanaian lawyers have sued, arguing the U.S. agreement violates international treaties Ghana itself has signed, including the Convention against Torture. Eleven of the deportees have separately sued over their detention at Dema camp, and a case is now pending before the regional Community Court of Justice of ECOWAS.
EQUATORIAL GUINEA: PEOPLE WHO ALREADY WON PROTECTION IN U.S. COURT, SENT ANYWAY
This is the detail that should be the most alarming across the entire program. Between November 2025 and June 2026, the U.S. ran four deportation flights to Equatorial Guinea carrying 40 people — and many of them had already been granted withholding of removal or Convention Against Torture protection by a U.S. immigration judge, meaning a judge had already formally ruled it was unsafe to send them back to their home country. Sent to Equatorial Guinea anyway. One man, Diadie Camara, had escaped hereditary slavery in Mauritania; he was repatriated back to Mauritania via Morocco despite having secured local support to file an asylum claim, and has since gone into hiding to avoid his former enslavers finding him. Another deportee — a gay man from Ghana who’d been granted U.S. protection specifically because of persecution over his sexual orientation — was sent back to Ghana, faced renewed threats there, and is now hiding in yet another country that also criminalizes LGBTQ+ people. The first flight’s passengers, per the tracker, were reportedly misled into believing they were simply being transferred to another domestic detention facility — not told they were leaving the country at all.
MILITARY AIRCRAFT ARE NOW PART OF THIS SYSTEM
Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor project documented nearly 90 deportation flights on U.S. military planes carried out in 2025 alone, reaching almost 40 countries and representing roughly 19% of all deportation flights during the administration’s first several months. One tracked flight took 14 third-country nationals to Ghana aboard a military aircraft that departed Alexandria, Louisiana, refueled in St. Croix, and landed in Accra. Military deportation flights specifically were paused as of September, per the same tracking data — but the broader third-country removal machinery, run through private charter contractors, has continued at scale regardless.
WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE INDIVIDUAL CASES
This is a system built on three compounding failures documented across independent legal, journalistic, and congressional sources: financial payments to often-authoritarian governments to accept people with no connection to them; a federal court ruling the underlying practice unlawful, functionally overridden by a Supreme Court stay rather than a decision on the actual merits; and specific, named individuals who had already won legal protection from a U.S. immigration judge, deported anyway to places where they’ve faced violence, detention in inhumane conditions, or forced returns to the exact danger a U.S. court had already recognized as real. That’s not deportation policy operating as designed. It’s a program that appears to be actively working around the legal protections meant to prevent exactly these outcomes, while the underlying legal question of whether any of it is constitutional remains formally unresolved on the merits.