How Trump turned a refugee bureau into a $410 million deportation operation

Inside the secret deals powering the president’s push to deport migrants to countries not their own.

September 21, 2026 at 1:00 a.m. EDTJust now

The U.S. diplomat arrived in West Africa in mid-June with little fanfare, hopscotching along the Atlantic coastline for scheduled visits with senior government officials in the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Togo and Gabon, whose president greeted him inside an opulent seaside palace.

The American, a career State Department official named Christian Ehrhardt, was an unlikely diplomatic VIP. For nearly two decades, he served as an officer in the agency’s security branch, focusing on embassy protection, before being summoned to Washington last year to lead a new initiative — the Office of Remigration.

Since then, Ehrhardt, 41, has crisscrossed Africa, trying to persuade the continent’s leaders to accept flights full of people deported from the United States even though the migrants are not their own citizens. These “third country” deportation deals, a controversial innovation of the second Trump administration, have become a central part of the president’s hard-line approach to immigration, and they’re negotiated by the office Ehrhardt now oversees.

He has been making rapid progress. The Trump administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate agreements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, as of the end of June, according to internal government records reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents, which have not been previously reported, provide the most comprehensive picture to date of the Trump administration’s fast-growing third-country network.

Under the arrangements, the U.S. has expelled migrants to countries across the globe where they have no previous connection. Early deals included flights to Costa Rica carrying migrants from China, Russia, Iran and Afghanistan and a flight to the tiny African kingdom of Eswatini with migrants from Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and Jamaica.

The agreements have been secured under the orders of Stephen Miller, a long-standing aide to the president who now serves as White House deputy chief of staff. Current and former officials say that Miller, known for his relentless anti-immigration focus, has been able to push key appointments at the State Department that have allowed him to overrule other foreign policy objectives in his goal of achieving more deportations.

Ehrhardt is “considered a White House envoy” when he meets with foreign leaders, said a U.S. official familiar with his meetings. “The messaging is not just that he is a deputy assistant secretary of state. He’s really part of the White House, so they roll out the red carpet.” This official, like many others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal State Department operations.

What countries get in return under these agreements varies significantly. The documents from inside the Office of Remigration reviewed by The Post show financial commitments that include $81 million in direct payments to 13 of the foreign governments. While that overall sum is small in terms of the U.S. budget, it often represents a massive expansion in funds being sent to authoritarian regimes that previously received smaller amounts from the United States. The deals were written through contracts designed to bypass statutory requirements, including human rights safeguards, that come with most foreign assistance spending, according to people familiar with the agreements.

The Office of Remigration — a division of about 15 employees in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) — marks an extraordinary break in U.S. foreign policy, inverting the nation’s long-standing commitment to resettling refugees in need into an intensive focus on expelling them from the country. The office’s name itself is a point of contention, as the term “remigration” has been popularized by white nationalists in Europe who seek the expulsion of racial minorities and immigrants.

The administration also has pledged grants totaling $179 million to the International Organization for Migration and $124 million to the U.N. Refugee Agency for refugee- and infrastructure-related projects in the third countries. Those organizations are not directly party to the deals, but that money has been negotiated by the foreign governments in connection to their deportation agreements, according to the government documents and people familiar with the deals. These payments have largely replaced voluntary contributions the U.S. government traditionally made to the global aid organizations and are used as “sweeteners” to get foreign countries to accept the third-country deportees, people familiar with the deals said.

Other documents showed the administration was in negotiations to pay millions more in potential deals with some of the countries Ehrhardt visited in June.

The deals also vary widely in size and scope, with foreign governments setting a range of conditions, according to the internal State Department documents. For example, Uganda will only take African nationals, while neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo has dictated the opposite, as it won’t accept anyone from Africa. Several countries, including the Central African Republic and Eswatini, have agreed to take violent criminals, but others such as Ghana and Sierra Leone only permit nonviolent offenders.

The through line, according to current and former State Department staffers, is that the administration is locking in the agreements as quickly as possible. Despite mounting costs and complexities, they said, the contracts require minimal oversight over how the money is spent and how the migrants are treated, even though some of the third countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes.

The State Department’s own human rights reports — intended as a tool to prevent foreign assistance from going to repressive governments — include accounts of serious abuses in several of the countries. Last year, for example, U.S. diplomats reported that torture had occurred in every prison in Equatorial Guinea and that government forces in Cameroon had killed unarmed civilians. The 2024 report on Gabon, which remains in negotiations with the U.S. following Ehrhardt’s visit in June, includes details of torture and indefinite detention.

Migrants whom the Trump administration has deported to third countries have alleged, in interviews and legal complaints, that they have been subjected to inhumane conditions — beaten by armed guards, denied food and prohibited from communicating with lawyers or their families.

What the Trump administration wanted “was fast money, with no strings attached,” said one former official who left the State Department over objections to the policy. “The whole point was to circumvent [congressional] notification that money was being sent to a government known to be corrupt.”

The Washington Post examined the Office of Remigration as part of The Deportation Project, a joint investigation into third-country removals conducted over six months by 26 media organizations in 15 countries, organized by Forbidden Stories, a nonprofit news organization based in Paris. Journalists interviewed dozens of former and current U.S. government officials, foreign leaders and immigration attorneys, reporting in seven of the third countries and speaking to 35 third-country nationals who were deported from the U.S.

At the center of the new system of third-country deportations is the State Department. Civil servants who spent their careers in humanitarian efforts are now tasked with helping the administration cajole countries into accepting migrants from around the world with little regard for the treatment they will receive once they depart the U.S.

Days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order suspending the processing of all refugees except White South Africans, all but shuttering a program through which the Biden administration had admitted more than 100,000 refugees in 2024.

The State Department severed long-standing contracts with U.S.-based resettlement groups and reappropriated $250 million from refugee aid programs to help finance “Project Homecoming,” a Department of Homeland Security initiative aimed at incentivizing migrants to voluntarily leave the country. Agency staffers were reassigned to monitor databases with information on deportation flights, the mounting tally of deportees and the costs of the contracts.

Administration officials say third-country deportations are the only way to remove the most difficult-to-deport migrants, including violent criminals who have committed rapes and murders. These migrants have final removal orders from U.S. immigration judges, but many are protected by federal law from being sent back to home countries where they are likely to face persecution. Others cannot be returned because their home countries refuse to accept them.

But immigration attorneys said the administration’s policy is a loophole to send migrants to third countries that, in turn, forcibly expel them to the dangerous homelands they fled — a process known as “refoulement” that violates international refugee treaties. On Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that the policy is unlawful, upholding a lower-court judge’s decision in a class-action case that the deportees were denied sufficient notice and the chance to raise fear-based claims against specific third countries. The Trump administration is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court.

“The Trump administration is well aware of the legal arguments against this policy, but they’re storming forward anyway,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, a co-counsel for the plaintiffs.

The State Department did not answer detailed questions from The Post and other partners in the project, but it said in a statement the U.S. government would use “all legal means to remove those with no right to remain in our country.”

Separately, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott pointed blame toward the Biden administration, which he said had led to “millions of illegal aliens” crossing the border while “millions more abused ‘legal’ pathways.”

“The result was crime, destabilization of communities, and the rise of transnational criminal organizations terrorizing Americans across the country,” Pigott said.

Lauren Bis, a White House spokeswoman, said that the “only illegal aliens going to third countries are those whose home countries won’t accept them including dangerous criminals or illegal aliens with orders of removal who have asked to not be removed to their home country.”

So far, the administration has deported more than 25,000 people to at least 28 third countries, according to an analysis for this story based on data collected from several independent sources, including Third-Country Deportation Watch — a tracking site run by Refugees International and Human Rights First — and the Berkeley Human Rights Center Investigation Lab. The vast majority, about 20,000, have been sent to Mexico, which has an informal agreement with the United States, and nearly all of the rest have been deported to countries in Africa and Latin America.

That is but a fraction of the 985,000 deportations that the Department of Homeland Security says it has carried out in Trump’s second term. But the policy has another significant impact: spreading fear and a deterrent message that migrants are better off returning home rather than risk being sent to an unknown location.

“We have changed the orientation of the bureau completely,” said Andrew Veprek, Ehrhardt’s boss and a Miller ally who spoke in April at the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank. Veprek was recently promoted at the State Department to oversee all U.S. foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs.

The PRM, the bureau that oversees the remigration office, had been a “humanitarian assistance” office with a budget of about $4 billion a year that “focused on bringing people to the United States,” he said. “Now, we are focused on implementing the president’s immigration agenda.”

Internal alarm

The State Department’s formal role in managing refugees dates back nearly half a century to the 1980 Refugee Act, which established a U.S. resettlement system. It was passed as the country was reckoning with the flood of refugees who had fled Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. The new law addressed those arrivals and brought the U.S. in line with international compacts that had their roots in the displacement of Jewish refugees and other Europeans during World War II.

The second Trump administration was determined to radically reshape the nation’s commitment to this system.

Days after the president’s inauguration, the State Department placed a sweeping freeze on foreign assistance and initiated a review of thousands of humanitarian grants to determine whether they violated the president’s executive order banning federal programs based on diversity, equity and inclusion.

The agency eliminated 4,100 of the grants — about 45 percent of all of its humanitarian programs — and the Department of Government Efficiency, run by tech magnate Elon Musk, cut 92 percent of the spending initiatives overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was shut down entirely.

Months later, the administration notified Congress that it was pursuing a broad restructuring of the State Department, sending lawmakers a 136-page memo that included plans for a new Office of Remigration. Shortly after the notification, a small group of senior State officials met with Spencer Chretien, who was serving as the bureau’s senior official while Veprek awaited Senate confirmation, to express their concerns about the use of the word “remigration” and its roots among white supremacists and far-right movements in Europe and North America.

Chretien had no background in international diplomacy, having worked in the presidential personnel office during Trump’s first term. He later worked on Project 2025, the Trump-aligned conservative initiative whose policy outline for a potential Trump second term included curtailing refugee admissions and shifting PRM’s focus toward containing an immigration “crisis.” During the meeting, according to two former officials with knowledge of it, a career official presented him with the Wikipedia page showing the definition of remigration.

Ehrhardt, who was also in the meeting and had only recently started his job, appeared “shocked” to learn of the racist origins of the word, according to one person present. Chretien appeared unmoved, but at the urging of senior staff, he agreed to hold an “all hands” call to discuss the changes. (Neither Chretien or Ehrhardt responded to requests for comment for this article.)

On the call, which took place June 9, according to contemporaneous notes from a staffer, Chretien said the bureau would continue “life-saving” foreign assistance but reduce other humanitarian programs. He also mentioned the creation of the Office of Remigration, prompting another staffer to protest in a written question.

“It seems like the definition of remigration is ‘ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation or promoted voluntary return of non-white immigrants,’” this person wrote, according to the staffer’s notes. “Will this be the core of what PRM is promoting? This is, of course, beyond alarming.”

Neither Chretien nor other top State Department officials answered staff questions during the call. But people who worked at PRM told The Post that career officials continued to raise internal objections over the term “remigration.”

“The answer we got back every single time is that it’s not changing,” said one career staffer familiar with the discussions who later resigned over disagreements with the bureau’s new mission. “The message we got was that was the exact terminology they wanted.”

On social media, Trump and the Department of Homeland Security also have used the term, which was popularized in recent years by Austrian white nationalist Martin Sellner, a former neo-Nazi who has called for the expulsion of most people of color from Europe. After Trump used the word in 2024, Sellner told The Post, “I always thought that this would be a meta political victory to make this term known, and against many odds, we really made it international.”

Asked about the association, Bis, the White House spokeswoman, told The Post in a statement: “Not everything you dislike is racist. Remigrate literally means to migrate back. By returning illegal aliens to their origin country, we are simply enforcing our nation’s laws.” She included a link to the definition of “remigrate” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

The definition for “remigration” in that same dictionary includes an alternate meaning: the “forcible return of immigrants and often their descendants to the immigrants’ countries of origin.”

The man on the inside

Though the Department of Homeland Security has been at the center of Trump’s mass deportation policy, the State Department plays a key, if less visible, role. Among the top leadership, it is Deputy Secretary Chris Landau, not Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been involved in negotiating the third-country deportation agreements, current and former government officials said.

Landau, a lawyer who had clerked for the conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2019 to 2021, hosted an event at the United Nations last year to push for overhauling the global asylum system. He also traveled to Palau for talks on a deportation deal. Landau did not return a request for comment.

But the key drivers of the administration’s policy are Miller, at the White House, and Veprek, a career diplomat.

At the think tank event in April, Veprek, 51, said the U.S. asylum system is too lenient, allowing migrants to remain in the country based on what he considers fraudulent or inflated claims — “a lever for all kinds of mischief by talented lawyers.” It’s a view he shares with Miller, according to people who have worked with both men. The two men worked closely in Trump’s first term on the White House Domestic Policy Council. One former colleague of both men said that Veprek was “kind of like a protégé” of Miller, even though he was a decade older. (Miller and Veprek did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

At the White House, Veprek garnered a reputation as the person who helped Miller implement his immigration vision through bureaucratic process, rather than polemical fury. Veprek’s own views may have taken shape early in his diplomatic career, when he served as a consular officer in Cameroon, where the U.S. Embassy reported to Washington that many asylum applications were “frivolous or fraudulent.”

Veprek later participated in a State Department fellowship at the Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2013, a period where a group of anti-immigration staffers were coalescing around Miller, then an adviser to Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

After his stint on the Domestic Policy Council in Trump’s first term, Veprek was sent back to the State Department as a deputy assistant secretary — an unusual promotion for a career diplomat of his rank. He served in that role from 2018 to 2020 but struggled to make progress for Miller on key issues, including efforts to slash refugee admissions, according to people who worked with him during this period.

Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 offered Veprek a second chance — and new power. He initially worked in the State Department’s counselor’s office, where he later told congressional staffers that he was one of a small group of people who initially worked on the department’s reorganization in early 2025.

In a statement, the State Department said The Post had mischaracterized the work of Veprek, Ehrhardt and Chretien and described them as “dedicated public servants who have worked tirelessly to promote prosperity and security for the American people.”

Some of the PRM staffers sensed more fundamental changes coming. At a brown bag seminar in March 2025, a State Department staff attorney explained the legal mechanisms available to facilitate DHS’s Operation Homecoming and a program run by the IOM called global assisted voluntary returns that gives help to migrants willing to return home. The presentation included a slideshow that stated the IOM could also provide “post-removal support for aliens deported by the United States to third countries.”

“They were laying it all out there in legalese, talking about agreements with different countries,” said a former PRM staffer who attended the meeting. “It was just so dystopian, everyone talking as if this was a normal thing. … At that meeting, they began to hint at a much larger-scale operation. I was just horrified.”

This person, who worked on humanitarian assistance programs focused on the Middle East, emailed the presenter after the meeting to register objections.

On July 11 of last year, the State Department announced the elimination of hundreds of positions, the tail end of the Trump administration’s downsizing of the federal workforce that Musk had helped kick off with DOGE’s dismantling of USAID.

Most of those who worked in PRM’s regional divisions were let go, but the staff of the Office of Western Hemisphere Assistance, which oversaw humanitarian programs in the Caribbean and Latin America, was spared. They were reassigned to new jobs in the Office of Remigration.

‘We don’t want any hurdles’

In early October last year, as the government entered a 43-day shutdown over a congressional budget impasse and most federal workers were furloughed, PRM’s leadership made clear to the few transplanted staff members still at work that the remigration office would be focused on deportations, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Ehrhardt, U.S. embassy staff members and senior State Department officials would handle negotiations with foreign leaders. The remigration office, according to an organization chart from August 2025 reviewed by The Post, would be divided into two units: “Voluntary Returns and Maritime Migration” — charged with overseeing PRM funding redirected for “Project Homecoming,” a DHS program offering migrants cash to voluntarily return home — and “Overseas Solutions,” responsible for facilitating the funding for third-country deportations.

“The marching orders were: ‘We want this done yesterday. We don’t want any hurdles; whatever those are, figure them out,’” said the former staffer who later left over objections to the program.

Ehrhardt, who speaks French and Spanish, was an unusual choice when the Trump administration tapped him last year for the high-level policy job. After joining the Foreign Service after college in 2007, he enrolled in the Diplomatic Security Service, a law enforcement division of the State Department and spent nearly two decades providing security at U.S. embassies, including in Africa.

One of the remigration office’s first assignments in October was to process a $7.5 million deal to send up to 250 third-country nationals to Equatorial Guinea, a nation of 2 million people along the western coast of Africa whose authoritarian leader, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has held power since 1979. The country had received scant annual assistance from the U.S. in recent years, topping out at $780,000 during Trump’s first term and $2 million during the Biden administration.

To overcome bureaucratic hurdles that slowed efforts for “Safe Third Country Agreements” in Trump’s first term, administration officials developed a new model, “Third Country National Arrangements,” which strips away legally binding human rights and asylum guarantees for less-enforceable verbal “assurances” made in an exchange of diplomatic notes, according to multiple people familiar with the contracts. A third deal type, known as a “Lilypad,” has been used primarily in Latin America for countries willing to accept migrants on a temporary basis before rerouting them to a different destination, officials said.

Officials also determined they could speed up the financial payments by invoking a provision in the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act that allows the executive branch to bypass statutory foreign-aid restrictions to fund crucial programs for refugees. Former State Department staffers said using this rationale for deportations is a perversion of Congress’s intent to ensure urgent, life-saving humanitarian assistance.

The only countries that responded to requests for comment from the consortium of publications in The Deportation Project were Mexico and Moldova, which both said they don’t have any formal, signed agreement with the U.S. but acknowledged accepting migrants from third countries. The State Department documents show Moldova has an agreement to accept up to 100 migrants from former Soviet countries with no criminal history and could be paid $250,000 by the United States. Moldova recently asked to pause the agreement after negative public reaction, a person familiar with the situation said.

In the case of Equatorial Guinea, however, the deal was slowed for another reason: The country’s banking system was so unreliable that the U.S. payments were frozen for weeks until an intermediary bank in Europe could confirm that the money could be safely transferred, according to two people familiar with the transaction.

The first deportation flight left the United States for Equatorial Guinea on Nov. 24, followed by five more flights between January and August. All told, more than 50 third-country nationals have been sent to the country, according to attorneys representing the deportees.

Among them were an Egyptian national and a Ghanaian man who had legal protective orders from U.S. immigration judges that prevented their deportations home over concerns that they could face torture as gay men.

‘These are not democracies’

A color-coded State Department map of Africa from March 2026 reviewed by The Post reveals the breadth of the Trump administration’s ambitions: U.S. officials had made overtures to 49 countries on the continent and secured deportation agreements with 13. Nine others were said to be in negotiations, including Togo, Guinea Bissau and Gabon — all on Ehrhardt’s itinerary in June.

Former PRM staffers said the circle of people involved in the talks is small and details are cloaked in secrecy, especially in autocratic countries.

“When you’re dealing with autocrats, it’s one person. These are not democracies,” said the current U.S. official, pointing to the kingdom of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, a tiny nation in southern Africa that is ruled by the continent’s last absolute monarchy.

The United States has sent 19 migrants to Eswatini under a deal that permits up to 150 deportees in exchange for a direct payment of $5.1 million, according to the documents. A group of human rights lawyers has sued the Eswatini government, alleging the contract bypassed parliamentary approval and the deportees were denied due process.

Tin Nguyen, an immigration attorney who represents Vietnamese and Laotian men deported to Eswatini and South Sudan, called the system a form of human trafficking with migrants used as barter for countries seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration. Some third countries have pursued other rewards at a time when the United States is also negotiating deals over global health funding and critical minerals and targeting many countries with visa restrictions.

“Human bodies are being pawned off and traded in order to get concessions from the U.S. government,” Nguyen said.

One of his Laotian clients, Phone Chomsavanh, has spent more than a year in detention in Eswatini. Chomsavanh, 45, was born in a Thai refugee camp, migrated to the United States with his family at age 7 and has never been to Laos. He served 17 years in prison for a second-degree murder conviction in Tennessee when he was 17. An immigration judge ordered his deportation specifically to Laos, but that nation, like Vietnam and Cambodia, has long refused to take back those who fled during the Vietnam War.

In an interview with The Post, Chomsavanh said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers did not tell him where he was being sent when they shackled his arms and legs and put him on a deportation flight with men from Vietnam, Cuba, Yemen and elsewhere in July 2025. In Eswatini, they were taken to a correctional facility with armed guards. Only one person from that flight, a Jamaican man, has been released after agreeing to return to his home country.

“He went back because he said he doesn’t want to die in prison,” Chomsavanh said.

Critics of the administration have accused it of blurring the lines between separate issues on foreign assistance and trade to push countries to agree to the deals. The administration is concurrently negotiating on commercial deals, visa bans and global health funding with many of the countries it wants to accept third country deportations.

The deportation agreements are influenced by domestic political concerns, with some governments fearful of public blowback. Costa Rican officials drew widespread recriminations after accepting two U.S. flights carrying 200 third-country nationals in February 2025.

The country has since signed a formal deal to take 25 migrants a week, but officials are seeking “integration assistance” from the U.S. — including language and job training — “to meet the country’s legal obligations and temper domestic political criticism,” according to an internal State Department memo reviewed by The Post.

Under the agreement, the U.S. is not paying Costa Rica directly but is sending $22.6 million to the IOM, which manages assisted voluntary returns to home countries, and $10 million to the U.N. Refugee Agency, which helps migrants seeking asylum in the third countries.

The role of those organizations has drawn criticism, as well. As part of the State Department’s foreign aid review last year, the Trump administration drastically cut annual U.S. contributions to the IOM and the U.N. for refugee programs, prompting budget shortfalls of 30 percent and 24 percent, respectively, and alarming countries that have long-relied on the international organizations to help manage migrant flows during civil unrest.

The administration has instead offered to send funding grants to the IOM or the U.N. Refugee Agency to support projects in specific countries as an incentive during negotiations with foreign governments over third-country deportation agreements, according to current and former State Department officials.

“This administration is conditioning any dollars having to be in support of third-county national agreements,” said the former PRM official who left the State Department over disagreements with the policy. For IOM and the U.N. Refugee Agency, “it’s the only way they’re going to be able to continue to operate — to make a deal with the devil.”

In some cases, the money supports projects that are not directly tied to the deportees. The State Department’s deal with the Central African Republic, for example, includes $85 million for the IOM, according to the internal documents. Of that, $60 million is for “community stabilization,” which includes building roads and other infrastructure in a nation riven by a years-long civil war.

“These are sweeteners,” said the current U.S. official, who added that Trump officials initially instructed State Department staff members to wait for countries to ask for humanitarian aid during deportation negotiations before offering it. But the guidance changed, the official said, and “now we can openly say, ‘We have humanitarian assistance if you want it.’”

IOM and U.N. officials said their organizations are not involved in negotiations with the Trump administration over the deportation deals, and they strongly disputed suggestions from human rights advocates that the money implicates the organization in Trump’s deportation agenda.

IOM officials said the organization offers food, medicine and other support for third-country nationals at the request of the host government and provides assistance to migrants who seek to return to their home countries. The U.N. said it helps migrants gain access to local asylum protections in the third countries and ensures they are not sent on to nations where they could face harm.

The IOM has worked with about 800 third-country nationals deported from the U.S., of which about 300 have received voluntary return assistance, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

“IOM is not involved in decisions to remove individuals from any country, nor does it participate in the enforcement of such decisions,” the organization said in a written statement. “Our engagement is in no way an endorsement of the decisions that led to individuals’ removal.”

Immigration lawyers said their clients have at times felt as if they had no choice but to return home rather than remain in an unfamiliar country.

“To my mind, the [migrant] is between a rock and a hard place: Do they want to stay locked up, in danger, in a place where they might only stay three months?” said Realmuto, the immigration attorney. “Or this person [from IOM] is offering a place that is familiar to them but where they could be persecuted or tortured. It’s a Hobson’s choice.”

Proponents of greater immigration restrictions say the program has effectively put pressure on recalcitrant countries to take back their nationals.

“There is no doubt that people are removed to third countries and then end up going back to their own country anyway, and that’s because their gambit failed” to remain in the United States, said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “This is a way to remove people who should be removed. The country of citizenship is responsible for their own citizens. I’m not saying it’s a great outcome for folks, but that’s the way it is.”

No safe haven

Even as the number of agreements grows, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has struggled to find migrants that fit the requirements and deportation flights are often sparsely populated, people with knowledge of the situation said.

The documents show that the majority of deportation slots available in the third countries remain unfilled. For example, only three migrants have been sent to Palau since the U.S. agreed in December to pay the country $7.5 million to accept up to 75 deportees, according to the internal State Department documents and people familiar with the deal.

But the administration has continued to push forward. In late August, a U.S. deportation flight landed in Liberia. Six third-country nationals on board — four Cuban men, a Brazilian man and a Cameroonian woman — refused to leave the plane, expressing fears that they would be placed in danger.

The migrants were told they would be returned to the United States, said Meredyth Yoon, litigation director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, who represents some of them. Instead, they were rerouted to Equatorial Guinea, the first country the Office of Remigration cut a deal with last summer. There, they joined dozens of other third-country nationals held at the Hotel Bamy, a decommissioned hotel in Malabo owned by the country’s vice president.

The situation at the hotel has grown increasingly dire, according to Yoon and other human rights lawyers, who say their clients have been beaten by armed guards, denied food and provided inadequate medical care. In June, this group of attorneys had filed a complaint with the main human rights body of the African Union, accusing the Trump administration of using the deportations to bypass U.S. and international laws banning refoulement. Instead of providing safe haven, the complaint alleges that Equatorial Guinea has forcibly sent migrants back to potential danger in their home nations.

Equatorial Guinea leaders strongly denied the allegations of abuse when two PRM officials visited the country to check in on the deportation deal, two months before the redirected flight from Liberia. The trip was arranged in response to mounting media attention on the country’s treatment of migrants, according to the current U.S. official.

On the ground, the U.S. officials toured the airport, hotel and medical facilities. They reported that the migrants were being held in a 75-room building described as a “decent hotel, 3 stars,” according to internal State Department notes on the trip, viewed by The Post. When an ICE deportation flight arrives, local officials said, Equatorial Guinean deportees on the plane are separated from the third-country nationals to film a “warning video” informing the public that “illegally migrating to the U.S. is not worth it,” according to the notes.

Equatorial Guinea officials told the American delegation that the government is providing each third-country migrant a $1,000 stipend and plane tickets to voluntarily return to either their home country or another nation of their choice except Brazil, because of its proximity to the United States.

Foreign Minister Simeón Oyono Esono Angüe dismissed the human rights complaints as coming from “enemies and NGOs” — nongovernmental organizations — that want to damage the country’s relationship with the United States. He said the government “would never force people to go back.”

“Claims of refoulement — hard to substantiate given TCNs are still at hotel since first flight and have not been ‘forced’ back,” the U.S. team wrote in their summary of the trip.

Human rights attorneys denounced the findings and said the Trump administration has failed to speak with migrants or their representatives about conditions at Hotel Bamy. Yoon said five of her clients were “dragged out of their rooms, handcuffed and choked” by guards in retaliation for filming with their cellphones and speaking about the conditions with journalists.

In early September, a short video filmed by one of the migrants showed hotel guards pointing rifles at detainees, who had their hands up, during a chaotic confrontation in the lobby.

The Trump administration’s treatment of the migrants “undermines the refugee system as a whole across the globe,” Yoon said in an interview. “The U.S. is setting a precedent through these third-country deportation agreements and completely abrogating its responsibility to refugees and the promises made after World War II. All of that is in the dustbin.”

Inside the Office of Remigration, the reports of alleged abuses have taken an emotional toll among the staff, some of whom have sought to transfer to other departments and others who have left the State Department altogether. They have begun to be replaced by new employees who are more supportive of the administration’s deportation agenda, according to people familiar with the staffing.

In recent weeks, the office’s focus has turned to the annual U.N. General Assembly meetings that begin Tuesday in New York City, where senior State Department officials, including Ehrhardt, will be meeting with delegations from Africa and Latin America, people involved in the planning said.

One person, who left the office this year, said some of their former colleagues struggled to remain positive about their work and commiserated on encrypted messaging platforms, sharing links to news stories about the plight of third-country deportees with a trigger warning that reading them would “make you feel awful.”

“Everybody feels pretty conflicted,” this former staffer said. “Morale is bad and it’s busy, and people do not want to be doing what they’re doing. It was a very painful thing.”