Disappeared to a Foreign Prison

In late summer, Yoon learned that ICE had moved Jim to its Alexandria Staging Facility, in central Louisiana, from which detainees tend to get deported. Yoon contacted ICE to find out where the agency was planning to send him. ICE never answered her e-mails. At that point, Yoon told me, “more alarm bells started going off.”

Then, on the morning of September 8th, Jim called Yoon in a panic. “I’m in Ghana!” he cried out. Yoon scrambled to gather information on Jim and the other detainees who were being held with him. Four days later, she and her colleagues filed an urgent lawsuit, sketching the life-or-death fears of five of them. The next morning, I received the call from all eleven individuals held in Bundase Training Camp, who asked me to describe their plight. “They didn’t tell us where we were going,” Jim said that morning. “They just kidnapped us overnight and whisked us out.”

For months, I had been trying to document the Trump Administration’s secretive third-country removals. At first, getting access to any information was daunting. Some of the deportees were held in far-off prisons or detention sites; others had gone into hiding. Friends and relatives in the U.S. often felt terrified of speaking out, fearing retaliation. “I don’t know that the piece you’re contemplating is necessarily writable right now,” a leading lawyer on the topic, Anwen Hughes, of the advocacy group Human Rights First, wrote to me in late July.

Initially, I’d focussed on two groups of third-country deportees, known to human-rights lawyers as the South Sudan Eight and the Eswatini Five. The first group, from countries including Myanmar, Mexico, and Laos, had been deported, in early July, to South Sudan, a nation struggling to recover from a 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 many years—had been deported to the southern African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. There, they were detained in a maximum-security prison, without clear justification.

“And this is my room. My parents kept it the way it was when I was little.”

Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby

These deportees appeared to have been handpicked by the Trump Administration to test a new approach to mass deportation. According to the Department of Homeland Security, all of them had been convicted of serious crimes, including murder. Announcing the flight to Eswatini, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for D.H.S., had called the five deportees “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,” a claim that at least one of the countries disavowed. Arguably the most surprising part of these early removals was also the least understood. It wasn’t just that these men were being sent to nations where they had no ties, and to places that were not safe. It was also that, in many cases, men who had completed their sentences in the U.S. years ago were now being subjected to indefinite detention abroad.

The wider strategy of forced third-country transfers had clear policy roots. On January 20th, the first day of Donald Trump’s second term, Trump issued an executive order called “Securing Our Borders,” which, among other things, declared an intention to expand the use of third-country deportations. On February 18th, D.H.S. issued an internal guidance memo, instructing immigration officers to “review for removal” all cases “on the non-detained docket”—meaning anyone with an immigration case who was not in ICE custody. As part of this review, D.H.S. officials would “determine the viability of removal to a third country”—and, if they found that third-country removal was viable, attempt to detain the person. The first large-scale third-country removals occurred that month and targeted newly arrived asylum seekers. Between February 12th and 15th, the U.S. sent two hundred and ninety-nine people—from countries such as Afghanistan, Cameroon, Somalia, and Iran—to Panama. On February 20th and 25th, the U.S. sent an additional two hundred people, including eighty-one children, to Costa Rica. Soon afterward came third-country-deportation flights to Uzbekistan and El Salvador, where more than two hundred and fifty non-Salvadoran immigrants were detained in the brutal Terrorism Confinement Center, also known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT. Some of the men held at CECOT were transferred there as part of another third-country-removal experiment: the President declared that the U.S. had been “invaded” by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, authorizing the removal of supposed gang members. (In June, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg found that the government had violated the rights of those men by not giving them an opportunity to challenge their deportations.)