Trump ramps up third-country US deportations despite global rights outcry

Official data shows tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers have been sent to countries they have no ties to. Save Share United States immigration authorities have dramatically stepped up detentions and deportations since January 2025, when Donald Trump became president. Trump campaigned on a pledge to implement the “largest deportation operation in American history”. Officers with the Department of Homeland Security, the agency tasked with the crackdown, nowmake thousands of arrests a dayacross the country. That includes people who are seeking asylum in the US, who are supposed to be given a chance to explain dangers they might face in their home country. And US law and international treaties, like the United Nations Convention Against Torture, prohibit authorities from deporting someone to any country in which they will be persecuted or tortured. Many of those being detained in the US immigration crackdown say they are at risk of being hurt or killed if they return to their native countries, so the Trump administration has looked for alternative places to deport them, including places someone might have no cultural or legal ties to. Third-country deportations, as the practice is known, have been criticised by the US as well as global rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as the UN. Critics of the practice say some of the countries taking in the deportees have a record of human rights abuses themselves, or are sodangerousthat the US government tells its own citizens not to travel there. They also say there is little to ensure these third countries will give deportees a fair hearing on their cases for asylum, and in the end might send them back to their native countries to face persecution there. Third-country deportations are not new, but rights groups say they were extremely rare before the Trump administration, and have never been used by the US at the scale they are now. Those being sent to other countries, rights groups say, would not have been deported without their consent. Some US courts have said the practice is illegal, but the US Supreme Court has allowed it to continue, including in arulingin September. Experts at the UN have said the practice was leading to a “cascade of human rights violations” across the globe, threatening to undo norms around how refugees and asylum seekers are treated....