At the end of the summer, Yoon learned that ICE had transferred Jim to its transit center in Alexandria, in central Louisiana, from where inmates tend to be deported. Yoon contacted ICE to find out where the agency planned to send him. ICE I never responded to his emails. At that point, Yoon told me, “other alarm bells started ringing.”
Then, on the morning of September 8, Jim called Yoon in a panic. “I’m in Ghana!” he shouted. Yoon hurried to gather information about Jim and the other inmates who were being held with him. Four days later, she and her colleagues filed an urgent legal action, describing the life and death fears of five of them. The next morning, I received a call from the eleven people detained at the Bundase training camp, who asked me to describe their fate. “They didn’t tell us where we were going,” Jim said that morning. “They kidnapped us overnight and took us outside.”
For months, I had been trying to document the secret expulsions to third countries carried out by the Trump administration. At first, accessing any information was intimidating. Some of the deportees were held in remote prisons or places of detention; others were in hiding. In the United States, friends and relatives were often terrified to speak out, fearing reprisals. “I don’t know if the article you are considering is necessarily writeable at this time,” a leading lawyer on the subject, Anwen Hughes of the advocacy group Human Rights First, wrote to me in late July.
Initially, I focused on two groups of third-country deportees, known to human rights lawyers as the South Sudan Eight and the Eswatini Five. The first group, from countries including Myanmar, Mexico and Laos, was deported in early July to South Sudan, a country struggling to recover from a civil war. Days later, the second group — five men from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen, all of whom had lived in the United States for many years — had been deported to the southern African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. There they were held in a maximum security prison, without clear justification.
These deportees appear to have been handpicked by the Trump administration to test a new approach to mass deportation. According to the Department of Homeland Security, all had been convicted of serious crimes, including murder. Announcing the flight to Eswatini, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin called the five deportees “so uniquely barbaric that their countries of origin refused to take them back,” a claim that at least one of the countries disavowed. The most surprising part of these first withdrawals was undoubtedly also the least understood. It wasn’t just that these men were being sent to countries where they had no connections and to places that were unsafe. Additionally, in many cases, men who had served their sentences in the United States years ago were now subject to indefinite detention abroad.
The broader strategy of forced transfers to third countries had clear political roots. On January 20, the first day of Donald Trump’s second term, he issued an executive order entitled “Securing Our Borders”, which declared, among other things, his intention to expand the use of expulsions to third countries. On February 18, DHS issued an internal guidance memo, directing immigration officials to “review for removal” all cases “on the non-detained person registry,” meaning anyone with an immigration record who was not in custody. ICE custody. As part of that review, DHS officials would “determine the viability of third-country removal” and, if they determined that third-country removal was viable, would attempt to detain the person. The first large-scale expulsions to third countries took place that month and targeted newly arrived asylum seekers. Between February 12 and 15, the United States sent two hundred and ninety-nine people, from countries including Afghanistan, Cameroon, Somalia and Iran, to Panama. On February 20 and 25, the United States sent an additional two hundred people, including eighty-one children, to Costa Rica. Shortly thereafter, third-country deportation flights took place to Uzbekistan and El Salvador, where more than two hundred and fifty non-Salvadoran immigrants were detained in the brutal Terrorism Containment Center, also known by its Spanish acronym, BLIND. Some of the men detained at BLIND were transferred there as part of another experiment in third-country deportation: the president declared that the United States had been “invaded” by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, authorizing the deportation of suspected members of that gang. (In June, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled that the government violated the men’s rights by failing to give them an opportunity to challenge their deportation.)
