https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/trump-has-built-a-third-country-deportation
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The Trump Administration is paying foreign governments to take people who aren’t their citizens—not just in a few cases, but in thousands of cases— under a system it has built largely outside public view. Some of these deportees have ended up imprisoned in an authoritarian African state. Here is what the U.S. is doing in the name of immigration enforcement.
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There is a hotel in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, called the Hotel Bamy.
It has 75 rooms. It is owned by the country’s vice president. And these days it is being used to hold people deported there by the United States.
They are not from Equatorial Guinea.
They are people the Trump administration wanted out of the United States but, for one reason or another, could not send back to their own countries. So the United States made a deal with Equatorial Guinea to take them.
The US agreed to pay $7.5 million for the country to accept as many as 250 people who aren’t Equatorial Guinean citizens. More than 50 have been sent there so far. Some had American immigration-court orders protecting them from being returned to their actual countries because they could face torture there.
And the Hotel Bamy is not some strange one-off arrangement.
The Trump administration has constructed an international system for sending deportees to countries that are not their own. As of the end of June, according to internal government records obtained by the Washington Post, the administration had authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate arrangements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America.
And this is already happening on a substantial scale.
The numbers are much larger than the few dozen cases that have made their way into the news. More than 5,000 people have been deported to third countries other than Mexico during Trump’s second term, nearly all of them to countries in Africa and Latin America. In many of these countries the deportees, who have no ties there, are kept in some form of custody.
An additional roughly 20,000 people have been sent to Mexico, but that is a somewhat different arrangement and deserves to be counted separately. Mexico has an informal understanding with the United States under which it accepts certain non-Mexican deportees, even though the Mexican government says it has no formal signed third-country agreement with Washington. Those who are sent to Mexico are provided assistance to return to their home country if they desire, and if not, the Mexican government assists in regularizing their situation in Mexico. Thus the Mexican situation is somewhat different than the other countries, who are undertaking the ffort pursuant to payments made by the Trump administration inducing them to accept the deportees.
Costa Rica has taken people from China, Russia, Iran and Afghanistan.
Eswatini has taken people from Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and Jamaica.
The administration has approached dozens of African governments looking for more places willing to participate.
This isn’t simply Trump deporting more people.
It is something structurally different.
The United States has built a third-country deportation system.
How do you build a system like this?
First you need countries willing to take people who aren’t theirs.
And one way to get them is to pay.
The Washington Post found at least $81 million in direct payments promised to 13 foreign governments. Another $179 million has been pledged to the International Organization for Migration and $124 million to the U.N. Refugee Agency for projects associated with countries participating in the arrangements. Current and former officials described some of that assistance to the Post as inducements to get governments to cooperate.
But this raises an obvious question.
What exactly are these countries being paid to do?
The answer varies from agreement to agreement, but generally they are agreeing to receive specified numbers and categories of people the United States wants to deport. The receiving government usually gets to decide whom it will accept. Some will take only particular nationalities. Some will take people with criminal records; others won’t. Some agreements are for a fixed number of people; others allow a certain number every week or month.
And once the deportee arrives, the receiving country assumes responsibility for what happens next.
That does not necessarily mean resettlement.
Some arrangements contemplate temporary stays while the person is returned to his home country or moved somewhere else. Guyana, for example, says the people it receives can ultimately return to their countries of origin or be relocated elsewhere. The Post reports that Equatorial Guinea told American officials it was giving each deportee $1,000 and a plane ticket to return voluntarily to his home country or travel to another country. (MS Comment: It does not appear they are doing that — rather, it appears they are holding the deportees as prisoners in the Hotel Bamy.)
The receiving government is also supposed to provide assurances that the deportee will not be persecuted or tortured there, or sent onward to a country where he would face persecution or torture.
But those assurances are central to what makes the new system different.
During Trump’s first term, the government pursued formal Safe Third Country Agreements, which carried legally binding asylum and human-rights protections.
This time officials developed another model called a Third Country National Arrangement.
According to officials familiar with the agreements, the new arrangements replace legally binding human-rights and asylum guarantees with less-enforceable assurances exchanged between governments.
In other words, we are not necessarily paying another country to give these people new lives there. We are paying it to take them off our hands, assume responsibility for them, and promise not to mistreat them or send them somewhere they will be mistreated. After that, the Trump administration essentially washes its hands of them and there is no indication of followup or enforcement of the terms of the agreement intended to protect the deportees.
There is now a State Department office devoted to doing this
The administration has created an office inside the State Department to make these arrangements happen.
Its name is the Office of Remigration.
It has about 15 employees. Its director, career diplomat Christian Ehrhardt, has been traveling through Africa meeting presidents and senior government officials and trying to persuade them to take America’s deportees.
The office is divided into two units. One handles voluntary returns and maritime migration. The other has the wonderfully bureaucratic name “Overseas Solutions.”
Its job is facilitating third-country deportations.
We now have American diplomats traveling around the world negotiating with governments over how many deportees they will accept, what kinds they will accept, and what money or other assistance the United States will provide.
Uganda will accept African nationals, but no one with a criminal history.
The Democratic Republic of Congo will accept non-Africans and will accept people with criminal records.
Ghana and Sierra Leone will accept only nonviolent offenders.
The Central African Republic and Eswatini will accept some people with violent convictions.
Some of the numbers are surprisingly large. The Democratic Republic of Congo agreed to accept as many as 2,000 people. Guinea-Bissau agreed to as many as 1,000. Equatorial Guinea agreed to 250.
Many of those slots remain unfilled. But that is precisely the point: the administration isn’t merely finding an occasional country willing to solve a difficult individual deportation case.
It is building capacity.
What happens after we send them away?
Equatorial Guinea is an authoritarian state ruled by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo since 1979.
The State Department’s own human-rights reporting has documented serious abuses in the country’s prisons, including torture.
Nevertheless, the United States agreed to pay Equatorial Guinea $7.5 million to accept as many as 250 third-country deportees. The first American deportation flight arrived November 24. Five more followed between January and August.
Many of the deportees were taken to the Hotel Bamy, the decommissioned hotel in Malabo owned by the country’s vice president.
And now we get some idea of what “the receiving country assumes responsibility” can mean in practice.
Human-rights attorneys representing people held there say their clients have been beaten by armed guards, denied food and provided inadequate medical care. The Equatorial Guinean government disputes those allegations.
There is video from September showing a police officer pointing a rifle at deportees with their hands raised.
More troubling still, some of the people sent there had already convinced American immigration judges that they could face torture if returned to their home countries. That meant the United States could not send them directly home.
But it could send them to Equatorial Guinea.
And Equatorial Guinea could eventually try to persuade them to go home.
That distinction is enormously important.
The legal principle known as non-refoulement is supposed to prevent a country from sending someone to a place where he faces persecution or torture. The diplomatic assurances given by receiving countries are intended to prevent the third-country system from becoming an indirect way around that protection.
But once the United States transfers custody, enforcing those assurances becomes considerably more complicated.
That is not merely hypothetical. Lawyers representing people sent to Equatorial Guinea say some have subsequently been returned to their countries of origin.
American officials have visited the Hotel Bamy.
According to internal State Department records obtained by the Post, they inspected the airport, medical facilities and hotel and described the Bamy as a “decent hotel, 3 stars.”
The assumption seemed to be that it would function as a hotel.
But it’s not that. It’s a prison.
The courts are beginning to intervene
The administration hasn’t completely escaped oversight.
The judiciary is providing some.
Just three days ago, a unanimous three-judge panel of the First Circuit largely upheld a lower-court ruling that the administration’s procedures for third-country deportations violated due-process requirements because migrants were not being given sufficient notice and a meaningful opportunity to raise fears that they could be persecuted or tortured in the country selected for them.
The court did not say that third-country deportations themselves are categorically forbidden.
The issue is what must happen before the government puts someone on that airplane.
If an Egyptian is legally protected from deportation to Egypt because an American judge has concluded that he could be tortured there, and the government instead proposes sending him to Equatorial Guinea, he must have a meaningful opportunity to say: I may be in danger there, too.
That litigation may continue.
But look at the chronology.
While the lawyers were arguing about the rules, the State Department was building the infrastructure.
The Office of Remigration was created. Diplomats were dispatched. Agreements were negotiated. Hundreds of millions of dollars were committed. Flights took off.
Thousands of people were sent into this new network beyond Mexico, while roughly 20,000 more were sent to Mexico under the separate informal arrangement between the two governments.
And only now are we beginning to understand the architecture behind it.
What do we owe someone we deport?
If a person’s own country won’t take him, can the US legitimately find another country that will? Is that a legitimate solution?
The law says that under some circumstances it’s acceptable.
But then the harder questions begin.
If the US pays that government to accept him, what obligation do we have to make sure he or she is safe?
What exactly has that government promised to do with the deportee?
Can it imprison him?
How long can it hold him?
Does he have a lawyer?
Can he apply for asylum there?
Can he work?
Can he remain there permanently?
Who checks on him?
And if the ultimate objective is to persuade the deportee to return “voluntarily” to the very country an American immigration judge determined could torture him, how voluntary is that decision after months of confinement thousands of miles from anyone he knows?
Those are the questions that become difficult to answer once custody is outsourced.
There are people sitting in the Hotel Bamy because the United States government put them there, with no way out, no rights, and no mechanism for their plight to be resolved. And they are they because the US Government put them there.
So — America isn’t merely deporting these people.
America—or rather the Trump administration — is choosing the country that will take custody of them. They are negotiating the terms. In many cases they are providing the money that makes the arrangement possible. And then they are relying substantially on that government’s assurances about what will happen next. (I’m saying “the Trump administration” but ti’s being done in our name, so “the United States” is doing all this. No getting around that.")
That means what happens after the airplane lands is not entirely someone else’s responsibility.
The United States put them on the plane.
The United States bears responsibility.
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