New flights to African countries show the Trump administration’s deportation strategy now reaches far beyond returns to migrants’ home nations. Court records establish broad removal authority, but they do not answer the accountability questions surrounding safety, custody and access to legal process after transfer.
When a U.S. deportation flight landed in Liberia this month, six passengers reportedly refused to leave the plane. They were not returned to the United States. They were flown instead to Equatorial Guinea, another country with a third-country deportation arrangement with the Trump administration.
That episode is more than a dramatic detail from a single flight. It illustrates the central feature—and the central unresolved problem—of the administration’s accelerating third-country deportation program: a person can be removed from the United States not to the country named in an immigration order, or even to a country with which they have any connection, but to a government willing to receive them.
Reporting from Liberia and Eswatini, along with newly reported U.S. government flight records, indicates the program expanded sharply in late August. Over roughly 10 days, ICE flights reportedly deposited more than 100 people in Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. The people were from countries including Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Nepal, Nicaragua, Turkey and Venezuela—not the countries where the flights landed. (aol.com)
The administration says such removals are a lawful response when immigrants cannot or will not be sent to their countries of nationality. That is a consequential claim, and the available record supports part of it: federal immigration law permits removal to certain alternative countries, including a country willing to accept the person. But the statute does not make the downstream questions disappear. Whether an individual faces persecution or torture in the destination country, whether that person had a meaningful chance to raise the concern, and whether the receiving government has actually provided safety or a durable legal status remain distinct factual and legal questions.
What the law permits—and what it does not settle
The legal foundation is not invented. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(2), the government has a sequence of options for choosing a removal country after a final removal order, including a country whose government accepts the person. In DHS v. D.V.D., the Supreme Court on June 23, 2025, paused a lower-court injunction that had required broader advance notice and an opportunity for people facing third-country removal to assert protection claims. The Court’s unsigned order gave the administration significant operational room while the litigation continued. (supremecourt.gov)
But calling that ruling a blanket judicial endorsement of every third-country transfer would be misleading. The Supreme Court did not issue a final merits decision declaring that every removal procedure used by DHS complies with federal law or the Constitution. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent documented disputed episodes in which people were given less than a day’s notice before planned removal to South Sudan; that account was not the Court’s holding, but it identifies the due-process conflict still at the heart of the case. (supremecourt.gov)
A separate Board of Immigration Appeals decision this year also underscores the difference between two often-conflated policies. “Asylum cooperative agreements” transfer some asylum claims to partner countries for adjudication. The Board held that, in that context, DHS can give notice orally and that immigration judges have limited authority to examine whether the partner country will accept the person or provide full and fair procedures. The ruling concerned an agreement with Ecuador, not the African transfers now drawing scrutiny. Still, it shows how the executive branch has been narrowing the role of immigration judges in policing the practical workings of third-country arrangements. (justice.gov)
The administration’s safety assurance is difficult to audit
DHS told CBS News on August 30 that when someone brings a court claim opposing return to a home country, the government is legally required to find a “safe and secure” alternative destination. That is the administration’s position. The reporting reviewed by SPILL does not establish that every country receiving deportees meets that description for every individual transferred there. (aol.com)
The gap is especially stark in the Central African Republic. The State Department’s current travel advisory tells U.S. citizens not to travel there because of armed conflict, crime, civil unrest and kidnapping risk. A travel advisory is not, by itself, a legal determination that every deportee will be persecuted or tortured. Nor does it prove that a U.S.-negotiated arrangement lacks safeguards. It does mean that the public cannot simply accept “safe and secure” as a self-proving description of the destination. (travel.state.gov)
One case makes the distinction concrete. CBS reported that an Afghan man identified only as Khalil had received withholding of removal in August 2025 after an immigration judge found that he could face persecution in Afghanistan. That protection barred return to Afghanistan, but it did not bar DHS from deporting him to a different country. His lawyer and brother said he was sent to the Central African Republic. The public record reviewed here does not independently establish his present location, conditions or access to counsel, so those points remain attributed claims rather than verified conclusions. (aol.com)
This is why the debate cannot be reduced to whether someone has a final removal order. A final order answers whether the United States may seek removal. It does not automatically answer whether a particular alternative country is safe for that person, whether the person received sufficient notice to contest transfer, or whether the destination government will release, resettle or indefinitely hold them.
Accountability shifts offshore
The Liberia flight also demonstrates how quickly responsibility can become blurred. The Associated Press reported that the six people who would not disembark in Liberia included four Cubans, a Brazilian man and a Cameroonian woman. A passenger and a lawyer said they were taken instead to Equatorial Guinea. AP reported that the country did not immediately respond to a request for comment about conditions described by advocates at a hotel where deportees were being held. Those conditions are allegations, not findings by a court or an independent monitor. But the absence of public agreements, custody records and independent access makes them unusually hard to test. (apnews.com)
That is the policy’s accountability dilemma. Once the United States transfers a person to a distant third country, ICE may characterize the removal as complete. Yet the practical consequences—detention, family separation, medical care, ability to contact a lawyer, possible onward deportation and potential exposure to harm—are determined abroad, often under agreements that are not fully public.
Supporters of the policy can reasonably argue that a government cannot run an immigration system if every country of origin can frustrate returns indefinitely. Critics can reasonably argue that removal authority must not become a mechanism for transferring people into opaque detention or danger beyond meaningful U.S. oversight. Both propositions can be true. The evidence-based question is whether the administration can document individualized safeguards and post-transfer outcomes, rather than only the fact that a plane departed.
What to watch next
Congress should press DHS and the State Department for a country-by-country accounting: the text or legal basis of each agreement; the number, nationality and immigration status of people transferred; notice and screening procedures; money or other consideration provided; detention locations; and verified outcomes after arrival. Courts will also determine how much process the Constitution and federal anti-torture protections require before a third-country transfer.
For voters, the immediate point is simpler. The administration’s program is no longer an exceptional response used in a few high-profile cases. The evidence now indicates a widening deportation network. Its legality in the abstract is only one part of the story. The test of the policy will be whether the government can show, case by case, where people were sent, why that destination was lawful and safe, and what happened to them afterward.
