Immigration agents prepare to detain an immigrant in Chicago, last month. The US plans to deport some immigrants to 'third' countries. Photo / Jamie Kelter Davis, the New York Times
The Trump Administration’s plan to deport people to countries where they are not citizens represents a sharp change for the United States, where such expulsions have been rare. But other countries have tried similar policies.
The US has already deported eight men who arrived in South Sudan this month - via Djibouti, where they were held for weeks in a metal shipping container at a naval base.
All but one of the migrants had no connection to South Sudan.
The State Department lists South Sudan as a ‘Level 4: Do Not Travel’ country because of “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict”.
Last week, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Todd Lyons, wrote in a memo to his workforce that officers could “immediately” start sending immigrants to “alternative” countries.
They included countries where officials have not provided “diplomatic assurances” that migrants will be safe, and with as little as six hours’ notice.
A Supreme Court ruling this month cleared the way for the policy.
Usually, under a removal order, migrants are deported to a country of which they are a citizen.
But some countries do not always co-operate with the US on deportations. They include Cuba, Laos, and Myanmar; some of the eight migrants sent to South Sudan were from those three nations.
In cases where countries do not agree to take in their own citizens, “other countries have agreed that they would take them in … and take care of them until their home country would receive them,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Fox News.
The US under President Donald Trump has also sent more than 130 Venezuelan migrants to the legal black hole of prisons in El Salvador. Trump used the wartime Alien Enemies Act to remove them, accusing them of terrorism because they had alleged markers of gang membership.
Although it is not the same as sending migrants to third countries, the US has used offshore detention facilities to hold terrorism suspects and process asylum seekers.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the US began sending terrorism suspects apprehended abroad to a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where some detainees still remain without having been tried.
Although most former Guantanamo detainees were returned to their home countries, about one-fifth ended up in third countries for resettlement, under deals brokered by Washington.
Before that, under President George Bush snr and President Bill Clinton, the base also served as a site to process thousands of intercepted asylum seekers, many from Haiti - a plan Trump has tried to restore and expand.
The CIA for years following 9/11 ran an “extraordinary rendition” programme, secretly moving terrorism suspects on private civilian aircraft to other countries to be interrogated at secret detention sites by CIA or local officials. More than 50 governments collaborated in some way, according to the Open Society Foundation.
Other countries have pursued third-country deportations.
Australia prevents anyone arriving by boat without a visa from settling in the country.
Instead, since 2013, authorities send asylum seekers offshore to processing facilities in the Pacific Island nations of Papua New Guinea and Nauru.
Medical and human rights professionals have warned that many children being raised in Australia’s third-country limbo have developed “resignation syndrome”, struggling to eat, drink and speak and in extreme cases requiring a feeding tube. Some have attempted suicide.
Starting in 2022, Britain’s Conservative Party, in power at the time, began trying to implement a policy that would send certain asylum seekers some 6440km to Rwanda to have their cases processed.
Those assessments could lead to migrants remaining in Rwanda under an agreement with its government, moving on to third countries not including Britain or being sent to their country of origin.
Then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the plan would “stop the boats”, echoing proponents of Australian policies.
The British plan ended up costing more than US$900 million, according to British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, but only four people in total - who volunteered to go for cash - wound up in Rwanda. The Labour Party quickly shut down the process upon taking over last year.
Israel had a similar but secret agreement with Rwanda, sending thousands of Israel-based Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers to Rwanda between 2013 and 2018, when the supreme court suspended the government plan, the BBC reported.
Those asylum seekers were given the choice to be sent to a migrant detention facility back home or receive US$3500 to go to Rwanda. Years later, many settled in Europe, the BBC found.
In recent months, India has been implementing a hard-line deportation drive against its Muslim minority.
Between early May and July, 1880 people were deported from India to Bangladesh, according to private Bangladeshi government data obtained by the Washington Post. More than 100 people were logged by border officials in Bangladesh as Indians who were wrongly deported and sent back, another document showed.
Rights advocates have challenged Trump’s third-country deportation efforts, arguing that the policy doesn’t give migrants a chance to plead their cases and that it violates federal and international law, if migrants are sent to places where they are known to face danger.
US District Judge Brian Murphy ruled in May that the Trump Administration had violated a court order by trying to send migrants to South Sudan, and that the “hurried and confused” notice given to the deportees was unreasonable.
Even though immigration laws contain provisions allowing the US government to deport people to third countries under some circumstances, it’s “just not something that’s been done as a matter of practice”, said Jennifer Koh, an associate professor at Pepperdine University’s Caruso School of Law.
Under international law, the US has a legal obligation not to send migrants to countries where they would face torture or cruel treatment - known as the principle of non-refoulement.
The new US policy, which requires minimal notice before such deportations, “seems like a recipe for rampant potential violations of the torture convention”, said Koh.
“The Administration has been pretty clear from the start” that “one of the tools to advance their immigration policy has been to inflict fear and cruelty on immigrants”, aiming for deterrence and self-deportation.
It’s “no accident” that the “third countries” chosen as destinations for migrants “are places that have notoriously bad human rights records, and where torture in custody is commonplace”, said Sarah Sherman-Stokes, a clinical associate professor at Boston University School of Law.