José Yugar-Cruz arrived at the U.S.-Arizona border legally last summer, walked directly to authorities, and asked for asylum. Six months later, an immigration judge found he had been tortured in Bolivia and would face torture again if sent back. The government did not appeal the ruling. Yet instead of being released, Yugar-Cruz sat in a county jail in Iowa for nearly a year while federal agents scrambled to find another place to send him.
In April, ICE placed him on a charter flight manifest bound for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country ravaged by conflict and corruption where Yugar-Cruz has never set foot, speaks no language, and has no connections. He had no family there. He knew nothing of the place. "I feel like a person who has no value," he said.
A temporary legal stay pulled him off that flight. But a federal judge later ruled he could not block a future deportation to the DRC, leaving his fate uncertain.
The plane Yugar-Cruz barely escaped carried 15 other South Americans to Kinshasa in chains. Handcuffs, waist chains, leg irons, sometimes straitjackets. When they landed, they were held in a rundown hotel near the airport where water shuts off for days, rodents infest rooms, and mosquitoes swarm constantly.
This arrangement with the DRC is not an outlier. It is the latest in a growing network of third-country deportation agreements that essentially outsources America's legal protection obligations to nations whose own asylum systems have collapsed or never existed. The Trump administration has deemed South Sudan, El Salvador, and Equatorial Guinea safe enough for these transfers. The U.S. is negotiating to send 1,100 Afghans who worked with American forces to the DRC as well.
The terms of these agreements remain locked away from courts, lawyers, and the public. The Department of Homeland Security has refused to disclose how many countries have signed on or what promises were made. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week that the administration has "achieved" and "signed agreements" with additional nations "to allow us to deport people to those countries," offering few details beyond that.
Human rights monitors have tallied the damage. Third Country Deportation Watch, a project of Human Rights First and Refugees International, estimates that as of May 2026, more than 17,500 people have been removed to countries that are not their own. The pace is accelerating rapidly.
Federal courts have split on whether the practice is legal. A judge in Massachusetts issued an injunction in 2025 requiring that people receive notice of where they will be deported and a chance to argue they face danger. A Washington DC judge called it a "widespread effort to evade the government's legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly." But the Supreme Court has repeatedly lifted these injunctions, allowing the removals to proceed.
The receiving countries themselves describe these arrangements as temporary. The DRC has explicitly stated its agreement is "part of the temporary reception mechanism" and "in no way constitutes a permanent installation." In practice, those deported from the U.S. face detention, pressure to leave immediately, or onward removal to even more dangerous places.
International law prohibits sending people to places where they face persecution or torture. That same rule forbids indirect transfers, where a receiving country is likely to send them onward into harm. These U.S. agreements allow the government to escape its legal obligations while other nations perform the illegal work.
Some governments have begun to resist. Costa Rica, Panama, and Uganda have released some detainees or refused further transfers after facing lawsuits in their own courts. But these defenses are scattered and the volume of deportations continues to climb.
Author James Rodriguez: "The U.S. is outsourcing its asylum obligations to countries that can't handle them, and hiding the entire scheme from public view."
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