Third-Country Deportations Are Redefining What Removal Means for Latin American Migrants in the Most Alarming Way

Three Latin American migrants spoke to El País near Monrovia, Liberia, describing in detail how they were detained, moved through multiple facilities without legal notification and placed on a plane to West Africa with hours of warning or none at all. They are living in a hotel in Marshall, a coastal city about 50 kilometers from the capital, with no information about when they will be allowed to leave. They were deported there by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on August 19th, flown on a charter flight that departed from Alexandria, Louisiana, alongside other detainees from Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. None of them had any connection to Liberia before that flight, and at least one of them had never heard of the country. They are not alone in this situation. The U.S. government has deported over 23,000 people to 26 nations between January 2025 and August 2026, with over 300 sent to 14 African countries, and their stories represent a broader pattern of third-country deportations that human rights organizations have been tracking with growing alarm since early 2025.

A Departure From What Deportation Is Supposed to Mean

Deportation, as it has been understood and practiced under international law for decades, means returning a person to their country of origin. It is a coercive act under any circumstances, but it operates within a framework that at minimum assumes the person being removed has some connection to the place they are being sent, a language, a family, a history, a legal identity. Third-country deportation strips even that away. The three men El País spoke to in Marshall were not sent home. They were sent somewhere entirely foreign to them, with no community waiting, no language in common, no legal pathway and no explanation of what comes next.

Both Venezuelan men held withholding of removal orders, legal protections that exist precisely because the U.S. and the international community recognized decades ago that some people cannot be safely returned anywhere, that sending them back would expose them to persecution, torture or death. Those protections are not technicalities. They are the product of hard-won international consensus rooted in the horrors of the 20th century, codified in the United Nations Refugee Convention and the Convention Against Torture. Deporting someone who holds those protections to a third country they have no connection to does not honor the spirit of those agreements. It circumvents them.

The human cost of that circumvention is visible in every detail of these three men’s accounts. One missed the birth of his son and has only seen him over video call. Another watched his family fracture across an ocean while his daughter went to therapy and his older son talked about dropping out of school. The third wept in an airport boarding area watching other detainees get physically restrained for resisting a deportation to a country none of them had chosen. These are not abstractions. These are the lived consequences of a policy that treats human beings as logistical problems to be redistributed across the globe rather than people with rights, families and legal protections that exist for a reason.

Three Men Who Had No Idea Where They Were Going

The two Venezuelans had each fled political persecution at home and were living and working legally in the United States when they were detained at routine immigration check-ins. One spent eight months across nine different detention facilities before being placed on the flight, discovering his destination only hours before departure when he glimpsed his name on a transfer list. The other was detained when he accompanied his wife to a routine immigration appointment. She was allowed to leave. He was held on the spot, moved through four facilities without his lawyer being notified and placed on the fifteen-hour flight to Liberia with detainees shackled at their hands and feet for the entire journey. The Honduran was pulled over by police while driving to pick up his wife from work, transferred to a Louisiana detention center and taken to the airport without explanation.

All three are currently in contact with U.S. law firms through a Liberian lawyer, and none of them want to stay in Liberia. International Organization for Migration staff visit them daily and one is receiving assistance with a chronic illness. The Liberian government has said they are free to move around the country, request asylum there or leave, but the reality outside the hotel feels unsafe enough that at least one of the men rarely ventures more than a few meters from the entrance.

The Legal Framework Behind the Deportations

The Department of Homeland Security published guidelines in March 2025 allowing third-country deportations to proceed without additional procedures and without asking whether the person feels unsafe in the destination country, as long as the receiving country provides assurances against expulsion or torture that the State Department considers credible. Human rights organizations have described this standard as dangerously insufficient, particularly given that several destination countries lack functional asylum systems.

Researchers at Human Rights First have stated that Liberia lacks the capacity to process asylum applications, raising serious concerns that deportees will end up in indefinite limbo or face further deportation back to the countries they originally fled. The American Immigration Council has also documented that constant transfers between detention facilities separate people from their families and support networks while making legal assistance nearly impossible to access. The first U.S. and Liberia agreement is currently being challenged in federal litigation over whether Liberia meets the legal standard of being a genuinely safe third country with a functional asylum system. The second agreement, announced more recently, is currently in force.

What Liberia Received in Exchange

The agreements are largely opaque, but Liberia’s case offers a partial picture of what receiving countries gain. After agreeing to accept deportees, Liberia received extended visa validity for its citizens traveling to the U.S., a commitment of $124 million in U.S. health sector funding and a $1.8 billion mining concession through a U.S.-backed company. A New York Times investigation later confirmed that the State Department had also agreed to provide $5 million directly to the Liberian government for managing third-country nationals, despite Liberia previously claiming it received no compensation and that the arrangement was strictly humanitarian.

Researchers at Refugees International have described the policy as an opaque and corrupt form of foreign policy where the money involved operates with little to no oversight. The current U.S. administration has spent over $40 million in taxpayer funds on these agreements according to a February report by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats, with the details of what receiving countries gain rarely disclosed to the public. The men in Marshall are the human face of that spending, and the question of what their presence in Liberia is actually meant to accomplish, beyond demonstrating the reach of U.S. immigration enforcement, remains unanswered.