Deportation to third countries leaves US immigrants in limbo

The Afghan man had fled the Taliban for refuge in upstate New York when US immigration authorities ordered him deported to Uganda. The Cuban woman was working at a Texas when she arrested after a minor traffic accident and told she was being sent to Ecuador.

There's the Mauritanian man living in Michigan told he'd have to go to Uganda, the Venezuelan mother in Ohio told she'd be sent to Ecuador and the Bolivians, Ecuadorians and so many others across the country ordered sent to Honduras.

They are among more than 13,000 immigrants who were living legally in the US, waiting for rulings on asylum claims, when they suddenly faced so-called third-country deportation orders, destined for countries where most had no ties, according to the nonprofit group Mobile Pathways, which pushes for transparency in immigration proceedings.

Yet few have been deported, even as the White House pushes for ever more immigrant expulsions. Thanks to unexplained changes in US policy, many are now mired in immigration limbo, unable to argue their asylum claims in court and unsure if they'll be shackled and put on a deportation flight to a country they've never seen.

Some are in detention, though it's unclear how many. All have lost permission to work legally, a right most had while pursuing their asylum claims, compounding the worry and dread that has rippled through immigrant communities. And that may be the point. “This administration's goal is to instill fear into people. That's the primary thing,” said Cassandra Charles, a senior staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Centre, which has been fighting the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda.

The fear of being deported to an unknown country could, advocates believe, drive migrants to abandon their immigration cases and decide to return to their home countries.

Things may be changing

In mid-March, top Immigration and Customs Enforcement legal officials told field attorneys with the Department of Homeland Security in an email to stop filing new motions for third-country deportations tied to asylum cases.

The email did not give a reason. It has not been publicly released, and DHS did not respond to requests to explain if the halt was permanent. But the earlier deportation cases? Those are continuing.

In 2024, a Guatemalan woman who says she had been held captive and repeatedly sexually assaulted by members of powerful gang arrived with her 4-year-old daughter at the US-Mexico border and asked for asylum. She later discovered she was pregnant with another child, conceived during a rape. In December, she sat in a San Francisco immigration courtroom and listened as an ICE attorney sought to have her deported.

The ICE attorney didn't ask the judge that she be sent back to Guatemala. Instead, the attorney said, the woman from the Indigenous Guatemalan highlands would go to one of three countries: Ecuador, Honduras or across the globe to Uganda. Until that moment, she'd never heard of Ecuador or Uganda.

“When I arrived in this country, I was filled with hope again and I thanked God for being alive,” the woman said after the hearing, her eyes filling with tears. “When I think about having to go to those other countries, I panic because I hear they are violent and dangerous.”

She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from US immigration authorities or the Guatemalan gang network.

ICE attorneys, the de facto prosecutors in immigration courts, were first instructed last summer to file motions known as “pretermissions” that end migrants' asylum claims and allow them to be deported.

“They're not saying the person doesn't have a claim,” said Sarah Mehta, who tracks immigration issues at the American Civil Liberties Union. “They're just saying, 'We're kicking this case completely out of court and we're going to send that person to another country.'”

The pace of deportation orders picked up in October after a ruling from the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals, which sets legal precedent inside the byzantine immigration court system.

The ruling from the three judges -– two appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the third a holdover from the first Trump administration -- cleared the way for migrants seeking asylum to be removed to any third country where the US State Department determines they won't face persecution or torture.

After the ruling, the government aggressively expanded the practice of ending asylum claims.

More than 13,000 migrants have been ordered deported to so-called “safe third countries” after their asylum cases were cancelled, according to data from San Francisco-based Mobile Pathways.

More than half the orders were for Honduras, Ecuador or Uganda, with the rest scattered among nearly three dozen other countries.

Deported migrants are free, at least theoretically, to pursue asylum and stay in those third countries, even if some have barely functioning asylum systems.