The Afghan man had fled the Taliban and sought refuge in upstate New York when US immigration authorities ordered his deportation to Uganda. The Cuban woman was working at a Texas Chick-fil-A store when she was arrested after a minor traffic accident and told she would be sent to Ecuador.
There is the Mauritanian man living in Michigan who was told he had to go to Uganda, the Venezuelan mother living in Ohio told she was being sent to Ecuador, and the Bolivians, Ecuadorians and many others across the country ordered to be sent to Honduras.
They are among more than 13,000 immigrants who were living legally in the United States, awaiting rulings on their asylum applications, when they suddenly faced what is called Third countryDeportation Orders, addressed to countries where Most of them don’t have relationshipsAccording to the non-profit group Mobile Pathways, which advocates for transparency in immigration procedures.
However, only a few of them have been deported, even as the White House pressures to do so More expulsions of immigrants. Thanks to unjustified changes in US policy, many of them are now mired in the immigration dilemma, unable to discuss their opinions. Asylum They claim in court unsure whether they will be shackled and put on a deportation flight to a country they have never seen before.
Some are in detention, although it is unclear how many. They have all lost their permission to work legally, a right that most of them had while pursuing their asylum applications, exacerbating the anxiety and panic that has spread to the migrant communities.
This may be the point.
“This administration’s goal is to instill fear in people. That’s the key thing,” said Cassandra Charles, a senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, which is fighting the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Human rights advocates believe that the fear of deportation to an unknown country can prompt migrants to abandon their immigration cases and decide to return to their countries of origin.
Things may change.
In mid-March, senior ICE legal officials told DHS field lawyers in an email to stop filing new requests for third-country removals related to asylum cases. The email, seen by The Associated Press, did not give any reason. It has not been made public, and DHS did not respond to requests to clarify whether the pause was permanent.
But previous deportations? Those are ongoing.
In 2024, a Guatemalan woman, who says she was repeatedly detained and sexually assaulted by members of a powerful gang, arrives with her 4-year-old daughter at the US-Mexico border and requests 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 lawyer sought her deportation.
ICE’s attorney did not ask the judge to return her to Guatemala. Instead, the woman will go from her native Guatemalan highlands to one of three countries: Ecuador, Honduras or across the world to Uganda, the lawyer said.
Up until that point, she had never heard of Ecuador or Uganda.
“When I arrived in this country, I was filled with hope again and thanked God for my survival,” the woman said after the session, her eyes filled with tears. “When I think about going to those other countries, I feel terrified because I heard they are violent and dangerous.” She spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation 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 applications known as “prior authorizations” that terminate immigrants’ asylum claims and allow them to be deported.
“They’re not saying a person doesn’t have a claim,” said Sarah Mehta, who tracks immigration issues at the American Civil Liberties Union. “They just say, ‘We’re going to throw this case completely out of court and we’re going to send this person to another country.’”
The pace of deportation orders accelerated in October following a ruling from the Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals, which set a legal precedent within the Byzantine immigration court system.
The ruling by the three judges — two appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the third from the first Trump administration — cleared the way for the removal of migrants seeking asylum to any third country where the US State Department determines they will not face persecution or torture.
Following the ruling, the government aggressively expanded the practice of terminating asylum claims.
More than 13,000 migrants have been ordered to be deported to so-called “safe third countries” after their asylum claims were canceled, according to data from San Francisco-based Mobile Pathways. More than half of the requests were directed to Honduras, Ecuador, or Uganda, while the rest were distributed to nearly thirty other countries.
Deported migrants are, at least in theory, free to seek asylum and remain in those third countries, even if some have barely functioning asylum systems.
Immigration authorities have released little information about third-country agreements, known as asylum cooperation agreements, or deportations, and it is not clear exactly how many people have been deported to third countries as part of asylum clearance processes.
According to Third Country Deportation Watch, a tracking organization run by the rights groups Refugees International and Human Rights First, fewer than 100 of them are believed to have been deported.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security described the agreements as “legal bilateral arrangements that allow illegal aliens seeking asylum in the United States to obtain protection in a partner country that has agreed to fairly adjudicate their claims.”
“DHS is using every legal tool available to address the backlog and abuse of the asylum system,” said the statement, which was attributed only to a DHS spokesperson. There are nearly 2 million asylum cases backlogged in the immigration system.
But the deportations clearly turned out to be much more complex than the government had anticipated, as they were limited by a variety of legal challenges, the scope of international agreements and a limited number of aircraft.
For example, Mobile Pathways data shows that thousands of people have been ordered to be deported to Honduras — despite a diplomatic agreement that allows the country to receive a total of only 10 such deportees per month for 24 months. Dozens of people ordered to travel to Honduras in recent months did not speak Spanish as a primary language, but spoke English, Uzbek and French, among other languages.
While orders were issued to send hundreds of migrants seeking asylum to Uganda, a senior Ugandan official said that none of them had arrived. Okello Oryem, Uganda’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, told the Associated Press that US authorities may be doing a “cost analysis” and trying to avoid sending flights with a small number of people on board.
“You can’t handle one or two people” at the same time, Orem said. “Loaded planes – this is the most effective method.”
Many immigration lawyers suspect that a March email ordering a halt to new asylum applications could signal a shift toward other forms of third-country deportations.
“Right now, they can’t remove that many people,” said the ACLU’s Mehta. “I think this will change.”
“They’re on a hiring spree right now. They’ll have more planes. If they get more agreements, they’ll be able to send more people to more countries.”
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Associated Press reporters Garance Burke in San Francisco, Joshua Goodman in Miami, Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, Marlon Gonzalez in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Molly A. Wallace in Chicago.