Madrid/Between January 20, 2025 and August 31, 2026, at least 25,447 citizens have been deported from the United States to countries with which they have no ties. The consortium Forbidden Stories has presented an interactive map of these transfers, mostly silenced by the US Government, and reveals that some 35 countries have signed agreements for which the Donald Trump Administration has planned a total budget of 410 million dollars.
Most of these migrants – 20,000 – have ended up to Mexicothrough four border crossings: the one that connects San Ysidro (California) with Tijuana (Baja California), Nogales (Arizona) with Sonora, El Paso (Texas) with Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua) and Port Isabel (Texas) with Matamoros (Tamaulipas). The rest have been dispersed to 27 other countries in Latin America, Africa and the Pacific. Seven other countries are about to do so through the same mechanism.
Forbidden Stories, which claims that the US contacted 49 of the 54 African countries to accept deportees from other countries, says that the agreements signed differ from each other in some details, for example in the nationalities that can be expelled or whether people with criminal records are accepted.
The organization is headed by Christian Jove Ehrhardt, a 41-year-old young diplomat who, the report notes, worked as a security agent.
The negotiations and payments, the investigation indicates, are carried out by the Office of Remigration, which belongs to the State Department and was only created in May 2025. The organization is directed by Christian Jove Ehrhardt, a 41-year-old young diplomat who, the report indicates, worked as a security agent.
The platform gives details of some of the agreements. With Palau, for example, a tiny island state in the western Pacific, an agreement was signed in December 2025 to accept up to 75 third-country nationals in exchange for $7.5 million, although so far only three have been sent.
TO Eswatini 32 deportees have arrived – among them the Cuban Roberto Mosquera del Peral, after serving a sentence for homicide in Miami – since July 2025. An agreement worth more than five million dollars – the African country does accept migrants with convictions – provides for a maximum of 160 people.
Of the 410 million dollars in total, the platform summarizes from internal documents of the State Department, 81 million were reserved for the signatory governments. The rest is destined for humanitarian organizations, according to the investigation, among them two dependent on the UN: 178 million dollars for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and 123 million for the Agency for Refugees (UNHCR).
UNHCR assured that “it does not participate in bilateral agreements and that US funding is used in accordance with its mandate to strengthen asylum systems.”
Asked about this, however, UNHCR assured Forbidden Stories that “it does not participate in bilateral agreements and that US funding is used in accordance with its mandate to strengthen asylum systems.” For its part, an IOM spokesperson stated that the criteria for accepting funding are based on “a single question”: “whether our participation will improve the lives of affected migrants. In these cases, we firmly believe that this is the case.”
The platform has collected data from organizations such as Human Rights First and Refugees International, which last year created an observatory for flights of deportees to third countries (Third Country Deportation Watch), as well as from the Human Rights Center (HRC) of the University of California at Berkeley and from reports published by media around the world, such as Agence France Presse. In total, a total of 24 organizations and 72 journalists have participated in the project, who have carried out the work for six months. “The data on this map does not come from the Trump Administration,” they assert.
“Thanks to a truly coordinated effort by civil society – including us, but also lawyers – we have managed to make the situation visible and make it difficult for this to happen in secret,” Savi Arvey of Human Rights First tells Forbidden Stories. The activist explains that her organization created a network of “collaborators on the ground in receiving countries to collect information on each flight carrying third-country citizens.”
They do not include in their count, they clarify, deportees to their country of origin who have passed through a third country before. The consortium states that it “contrasted the data with information available from other sources wherever possible.”
Last Friday, a federal court paralyzed express deportations to third countries
As part of their methodology, they explain that they have included flight dates whenever possible. “In the case of some countries that receive a large volume of deportation flights, such as Ecuador, Guatemala or Honduras, it is sometimes difficult to identify which of them may have transported third-country nationals,” they clarify. That is why in those cases the number of flights is indicated as “unknown”.
Deportation to third countries, used on rare occasions by previous governments, has been one of the tools used by the Donald Trump Administration as part of the tightening of immigration measures. Just last Friday, he received a judicial setback, when a federal court stopped express deportations.
This type of transfer, ruled by the First Circuit Court of Appeals based in Boston, must be accompanied by all due process guarantees, including information about which country they are being sent to and the opportunity to seek protection based on fear of torture or persecution.
“A person’s right to challenge removal to a country based on fear of persecution in that country means little if he or she does not receive advance notice of the intended removal destination and a meaningful opportunity to challenge that destination,” ruled one of the court’s judges, Seth Aframe.
