The U.S. Is Sending Deportees to Countries They’ve Never Called Home

The second Trump administration has made widespread use of deporting migrants to places other than their home countries. A recent report shows how it is expanding the approach.

The federal government has been deporting Mexican nationals to Guatemala and Honduras, CBS News reported Tuesday, even though Mexico is willing to accept its own citizens. “The Government of Mexico accepts the return of all its nationals. It therefore rejects the deportation of Mexican nationals to third countries and has no such agreement in place,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. “Mexico consistently takes the steps necessary to ensure the safe and dignified return of all its nationals to national territory.”

Guatemala confirmed that it had received about 2,300 Mexican nationals this year. “They are arriving in planes of Guatemalan returnees,” said President Bernardo Arévalo, “and what we have done is ​process them as in transit, in coordination with the Mexican immigration authorities.”

The tactic, two anonymous officials from the Department of Homeland Security told CBS, is meant to deter illegal immigration from Mexico by putting more distance between deportees and the U.S.-Mexico border.

It is questionable how effective the approach is when considering how it has worked in practice. Those migrants stayed for less than a day before they were sent back to Mexico, Arévalo said in that same interview, and the costs were covered by the U.S. or Mexican governments.

Third-country deportations are typically reserved for two scenarios: when courts determine someone cannot be deported to their home country because they would likely face violence or persecution there, or when the home country has tense relations with the U.S.—see: Iran, Cuba, etc.—and declines to accept deportees.

Yet these deportation stories continue to pile up. In April, for example, the government transported a group of 15 South American migrants—who had been granted humanitarian protections in the United States—to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where there is currently an outbreak of Ebola. The U.S. Department of State noted in a 2022 report that “more than a dozen significant armed groups and about 100 criminal gangs and local militias,” including a regional ISIS affiliate, are active in the country. One Colombian woman, who spoke with Reuters, had been granted withholding of removal to Colombia after a judge ruled she was likely to face torture there. She was instead sent to DRC, where conditions are so hostile that she said the group had no viable long-term option and felt “pressured to agree to go back to our country, regardless of the risks.”

That process, whereby a third-country deportation is a step to sending a migrant back to a country they had been granted legal protection from, is known as “chain refoulement.”

The Trump administration has agreements with a slew of third countries. Several groups of migrants, for instance, have been deported to Equatorial Guinea, a country that is run by a dictator and has no meaningful human rights. The country scored a 5 out of 100 on Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2025 report. This places it just above North Korea. Deportees are locked in the Bamy Hotel, which is owned by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo’s family, and have often been sent back to the home countries they had been granted protection from.

Ahmed Soliman was one such deportee whom the government put on a flight to Equatorial Guinea in April. The 30-year-old moved to the United States at 4 years old when his family fled Egypt; his father had attracted the ire of the government there for criticizing then-President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, per Soliman’s petition for protection from removal to that country. He has not lived in Egypt since and does not speak the language.

After spending two years in prison in connection with charges stemming from a fentanyl addiction, he was placed in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. A U.S. judge had granted him protection from deportation to Egypt. So he was instead sent to Equatorial Guinea, where several deportees being held at the Bamy Hotel were recently assaulted by guards, according to reporting by the Arizona Daily Star.

Like many people in his position, Soliman may end up back in Egypt anyway, despite having been granted protection from going there and having spent nearly his entire life in the United States.