At the end of the summer, Yun learned that ICE moved Jim to their detention center in Alexandria in central Louisiana, from where detainees are routinely deported. Yoon contacted ICE to find out where the agency planned to send him. ICE never responded to her emails. At this point, Yoon told me, “new alarm bells began to sound.”
Then, on the morning of September 8, Jim called Yoon in a panic. “I'm in Ghana!” – he cried. Yoon struggled to gather information about Jim and the other detainees who were being held with him. Four days later, she and her colleagues filed an urgent claim, describing life and death fears for five of them. The next morning, all eleven people held at the Bundas training camp called me and asked me to describe their plight. “They didn’t tell us where we were going,” Jim said that morning. “They just kidnapped us at night and took us away.”
For months, I have been trying to document the Trump administration's secret expulsions from third countries. At first it was difficult to access any information. Some of the deportees were held in remote prisons or detention centers; others fled. Friends and family in the US were often afraid to speak out for fear of retribution. “I’m not sure the article you’re contemplating can necessarily be written right now,” Anwen Hughes, a leading lawyer on the topic, of the advocacy group Human Rights First, wrote to me in late July.
I initially focused on two groups of third-country deportees known to human rights lawyers as the “South Sudan Eight” and the “Eswati 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 civil war. Days later, the second group—five men from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen, all of whom had lived in the U.S. for years—were deported to the southern African country of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. There they were placed in a maximum security prison for no apparent reason.
These deportees appear to have been selected by the Trump administration to test a new approach to mass deportation. All were convicted of serious crimes, including murder, according to the Department of Homeland Security. In announcing the flight to Eswatini, Trisha McLaughlin, a DHS spokeswoman, called the five deportees “such unique barbarians that their home countries refused to take them back,” a claim that at least one country has disavowed. Perhaps the most surprising part of these early exceptions was also the least understood. It's not just that these people were sent to countries with which they had no connections and to unsafe places. Additionally, in many cases, men who had served their sentences in the United States many years ago were now facing indefinite imprisonment abroad.
The broader strategy of forced relocation to third countries had clear political roots. On January 20, the first day of Donald Trump's second term, Trump issued an executive order entitled “Securing Our Borders,” which, among other things, announced his intention to expand the use of third-country deportations. On February 18, DHS issued an internal guidance directing immigration officials to “consider for removal” all cases “on the non-detention list,” that is, anyone who has an immigration case but was not on the detainee list. ICE care. As part of that review, DHS officials would “determine the appropriateness of removal to a third country” — and, if they find that removal from a third country is appropriate, attempt to detain the person. The same month saw the first large-scale third-country deportations targeting newly arrived asylum seekers. Between February 12 and February 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 two hundred more people to Costa Rica, including eighty-one children. This was soon followed by deportation flights from third countries to Uzbekistan and El Salvador, where more than two hundred and fifty non-El Salvadoran immigrants were detained in the brutal Terrorist Detention Center, also known by its Spanish acronym: BLIND. Some of the men held in BLIND were transferred there as part of another experiment in expulsion from third countries: the president declared that the United States had been “invaded” by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, allowing the deportation of alleged gang members. (In June, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg found that the government had violated the men's rights by denying them the opportunity to challenge their deportation.)
