25,000 people sent to countries that are not their own
Thirty-five agreements, 410 million dollars promised and a federal court saying on Friday that the policy is illegal. The American government built a removal architecture that pays governments and UN agencies, and the result so far is cost without policy.
On Friday, a US federal court ruled that the policy of deporting people to countries that are not their own is illegal. Over the same weekend, an investigation by 24 newsrooms revealed the scale of what had been built: 35 agreements with foreign governments, more than 25,000 people sent to countries where they have no ties whatsoever, and at least 410 million dollars promised to keep the machinery turning.
The two stories, taken together, describe a system that keeps operating after losing in court.
What was built
The investigation, coordinated by Forbidden Stories, of Paris, and published by the Guardian, AFP, France24 and the Washington Post, among others, is the most complete portrait of a policy that ran in secrecy. Since returning to power in 2025, Donald Trump’s government has signed 35 agreements that allow the deportation of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers to third countries, according to the Guardian. The government’s own internal records, obtained by the Washington Post, show that the administration authorised or promised at least 410 million dollars to make the deals with 31 countries viable, most of them in Africa and Latin America.
The money has an address. Of the 410 million, 81 million was set aside for the signatory governments, through fast-track contracts that bypassed the human rights requirements of American foreign aid, according to the newspaper, which drew objections from Democratic lawmakers. The rest went to aid organisations: more than 178 million to the International Organization for Migration and 123 million to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Palau and Eswatini are among the 13 signatory countries that received direct compensation, according to the same documents.
Whoever negotiates and pays is a little-known division of the State Department, the Office of Remigration, created in 2025 inside the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. The bureau that existed for humanitarian assistance turned, in the words of one of its directors, to “implementing the president’s migration agenda”. An office map dated March 2026 shows that, of Africa’s 54 countries, 49 were approached and nine were in negotiation.
What the policy has produced so far is a machine that spends with administrative precision and a result that does not add up.
Money against outcome
The same documents expose the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. Cameroon was allocated 30 million dollars, in support of UN operations in the country, in exchange for accepting a thousand migrants. The United States sent 44. The Democratic Republic of the Congo was promised 75 million to take in two thousand; 15 arrived, and flights to Kinshasa are suspended because of the Ebola outbreak.
In these numbers there is no scale compatible with the cost. There is payment for a capacity to receive that was barely used, and there are countries signing for money they do not control, since most of the amount goes not to them but to international agencies operating on their territory.
The ruling the programme ignored
On Friday, the First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the February decision that found the policy illegal. The basis is due process: the Department of Homeland Security violates rights by deporting people to third countries without giving them sufficient notice and without a real chance to claim fear of returning, which is exactly what refugee law provides for.
The ruling applies to a programme that has already sent thousands of people to countries that are not their own. It is a judicial veto on an accomplished fact, and it is the third time this decade that the design of American immigration policy has rested on its own reading of the law, only to find the limit in court.
The part that is hardly discussed
The investigation records a detail that is more unsettling than the numbers: the two UN agencies that receive money from the arrangement have a protection mandate, and have drawn criticism because of that link. A removal architecture that transfers resources to bodies created to protect refugees solves, for the government that designed it, two problems at once: it carries out the policy and shifts responsibility onto those with a legal obligation to protect.
The case the Washington Post reconstructed is the portrait of that. An Iranian convert to Christianity was sent to Panama. There was no plan for what came next, because the agreement provided for the sending, not the arrival.
What remains
The policy keeps being built while it is contested in court, and the next diplomatic round is already scheduled: on the margins of the UN General Assembly, in New York, State Department officials are receiving African and Latin American delegations, according to the Washington Post. It is the same week in which the court said the instrument is illegal.
For the countries that accept the money, the calculation is short-term and the cost is diffuse: a budget promise in exchange for receiving people with no ties, no network and no prospect of return. For the deported, the calculation runs the other way and has no deadline. The bill for a policy nobody wanted to sign falls to those who were sent, and that is the only part of the arrangement with no fast track.