In March of 2025, the Trump Administration was widely criticized for sending more than two hundred Venezuelans to CECOT, a notoriously brutal mega-prison in El Salvador. Yet, over the past eleven months, the Administration has continued the practice of deporting large numbers of noncitizens to so-called third countries, or countries to which the deportee typically has no connection. This is often because many immigrants living in America have judicial orders that prevent the government from sending them to their home country owing to the risk of persecution. This third-country practice has continued, however, despite the fact that a number of deportees have been sent back to their home countries after arriving in the third country. (Others remain stuck in prisons.) Recently, the Administration sent nine people of various nationalities to Cameroon, where most of them are now being held in detention until they agree to return to their home countries.
I recently spoke by phone with Ahilan Arulanantham, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and the faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy there. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how judges have tried to limit the Trump Administration’s use of this third-country loophole by demanding that it bring wrongly deported immigrants home, the legal process that allows this type of deportation, and how the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to rein in the Trump Administration has strained federal courts.
Early in Trump’s second term, there was a lot of concern about the degree to which immigration authorities would start removing people from America and sending them to third countries. A year later, how prevalent is this?
I think it’s important to distinguish between third-country arrangements that result in the deportees being imprisoned in a foreign country, and other kinds of third-country arrangements, where, for example, Mexico has agreed to take in people who are not from Mexico and then, in some way or another, encourage those people to go back to their home countries. I would say that, in the case of the latter, the deportations to countries where people are just left at sea have happened on a massive, really unprecedented scale.
The former, which are these deportation-to-prison arrangements, obviously happened with El Salvador, and then in other places like Ghana, and they’re also very troubling. But the total number of them is small. It’s probably less than a hundred, if you leave out the ones to El Salvador.
In January, the Trump Administration secretly deported nine people to Cameroon, where none of them are from, according to the Times. It seems like when the Administration is legally prohibited from deporting people to a country where they may be persecuted, they send people to a third country, and then essentially throw up their hands and say, “Well, if the third country is going to send them to the country that they’re not supposed to be sent to, we can’t do anything.” Some legal observers argue that this workaround is just as illegal. How do you see it?
I think it’s clearly illegal for two different reasons. The Administration’s recent arrangement with Cameroon resulted in the imprisonment of these nine people in Cameroon, and, at least in the reporting that I’ve read, most of them will be imprisoned unless they agree to go back to their home country. So that’s punishment. When you send somebody to a place to be imprisoned, that is imprisonment without trial. And so that, I think, is unquestionably illegal.
Separate from that, even in cases where they’re being sent to these places, and it’s not necessarily resulting in imprisonment, but it’s resulting in a follow-on deportation, that is illegal—absent the person having had an opportunity to challenge that arrangement in the United States in immigration court. The law requires deportees to receive notice of the country to which they are going to be removed, and then an opportunity to raise any claims against that decision in court. This was challenged in Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. last year, a class-action lawsuit challenging the government’s practice of sending people to third countries without providing any notice or opportunity to challenge the legality of that arrangement. A lower court held a hearing, took evidence, and issued a ruling declaring that procedure unlawful and requiring the government to provide notice in such situations. But the Supreme Court then stayed that order in mid-April without real explanation. They didn’t say that the lower court was wrong. They just said that the government can keep doing third-country deportations while the case is pending.
Is the Court going to come back and provide an explanation for why it stayed the order at some point?
The way the Supreme Court handles stay orders requires that the case come back to the Supreme Court, and then the Court has to either agree to take it or not. And if they decide not to take it, then the stay expires at that point. So you’re right that every time the Supreme Court stays an order in these cases, it means that the case will return to the Supreme Court, but it’s not like that happens immediately. That can take months and months, and there is, in my view, a direct line from the Supreme Court’s stay order in the D.V.D. case to the months of third-country removals that we’ve been seeing without people having any opportunity to contest the legality of that practice.
So is the lack of any opportunity for the deportees to have the Supreme Court rule on the challenge to third-country removal before they were flown away the reason that you think this was illegal?
The law on this is that a noncitizen gets to elect the country to which they will be deported in the event of an order of removal after a deportation hearing. The immigration judge asks the person to elect which country they wish to be removed to. In that case, the government has to try to send the person to their requested country. But if they can’t, for whatever reason—and one reason might be because the immigration judge has said, “You’ll be tortured there,” and barred it—then the government has to go through a whole list of other possible places to which they can send the person, like places where the person transited through or any other place where the person held any residency status. If none of those places agree to take them, they can be deported to any other country that accepts the person. But in that case they have to tell the person, We’re going to send you to this country. And because that wasn’t the subject of the original removal proceeding, they have to be given the opportunity to challenge the removal to that country.
