Federal agents are seen during an anti-immigration raid in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The US spent more than US$40m ($66m) last year to send hundreds of migrants to at least two-dozen countries that are not their own. Photo / Charly Triballeau, AFP
The United States spent more than US$40 million ($66m) last year to send hundreds of migrants to at least two-dozen countries that are not their own.
It’s a tactic Senate Democrats described in a report on Saturday as a costly strategy aimed at sowing fear and intimidation in the Trump Administration’s mass deportation campaign.
The 30-page analysis from the minority members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee accuses the Administration of entering into opaque financial agreements with foreign governments - including some with poor records on corruption and human rights - to rapidly expand a programme for “third country” removals that once had been reserved for exceptional circumstances.
Its authors contend that the US State Department has failed to conduct sufficient oversight to ensure that payments to those countries are not being misspent and that migrants transferred to their custody are not being abused or mistreated.
The Administration “has expanded and institutionalised a system in which the US urges or coerces countries to accept migrants who are not their citizens, often through arrangements that are costly, inefficient and poorly monitored,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), the top Democrat on the committee, wrote in a letter to colleagues.
“Deporting migrants to countries they have no connection to … has become a routine instrument of diplomacy.”
Administration officials have said they have no choice but to partner with foreign governments that are willing to accept undocumented immigrants whose native nations are not willing to take them back.
In most cases, the migrants have criminal records, authorities said, though public records have shown that some have not been convicted of crimes in the US.
The report from Senate Democrats, which provides the most comprehensive look at the Administration’s third-country removal programme, found that the US Government has sent migrants to two-dozen third countries.
The analysis focused primarily on five nations - El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, Eswatini and Palau - with which the Trump Administration has entered into direct financial payments totalling US$32m, a committee member involved in the report said.
Under those agreements, US authorities sent about 250 Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, while 29 migrants have been deported to Equatorial Guinea, 15 to Eswatini and seven to Rwanda, the report said. None has been sent to Palau.
The report also estimated that the Administration has spent more than US$7m in costs related to deportation flights to 10 of the third countries.
“Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent without meaningful oversight or accountability,” Shaheen wrote in her letter. “And speed and deterrence are being prioritised over due process and respect for human rights.”
Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, said the report shows the “unprecedented” work the Administration has undertaken in its first year to enforce immigration laws.
“Astonishingly, some in Congress still want to go back to a time just 14 months ago when cartels had free rein to poison Americans and our border was open,” Pigott said in a statement.
“Make no mistake, President Trump has brought Biden’s era of mass illegal immigration to an end, and we are all safer for it.”
The third-country strategy has provoked public blowback and legal challenges that have slowed the Administration’s efforts and, in some instances, forced it to change course.
Last year, US President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used law targeting enemy combatants, which provided the Administration’s legal rationale to send the Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.
Administration officials accused many of being members of the Tren de Aragua transnational gang, though some of their families and attorneys disputed that contention.
The men were later transferred from El Salvador to Venezuela under a prisoner swap. On Friday, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the Administration must bring some of the Venezuelan deportees back to the US as they pursue legal challenges to their removals.
“It is worth emphasising that this situation would never have arisen had the Government simply afforded Plaintiffs their constitutional rights before initially deporting them,” Chief US District Judge James Boasberg wrote in his ruling.
The analysis from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority was put together over a period of more than eight months, based on conversations with foreign government and US government officials, lawyers for deportees and immigrant rights organisations, according to the committee staffer.
The staffer said the goal of the report is to highlight the costs of the Administration’s approach at a time when Democrats are concerned that the US Government is “entering a new phase” of speeding up the number of third-country agreements, along with the pace of deportations.
The authors said the Trump Administration’s payment of US$7.5m to Equatorial Guinea to accept immigrants was more than the amount of foreign assistance the US provided to that country in the previous eight years. They cited a 2025 State Department report on human trafficking that cited US concerns about “corruption and official complicity in trafficking crimes” in that country.
The report also said the Trump Administration was moving hastily to carry out third-country removals without trying to negotiate with the home countries of some deportees.
In one case, a man initially deported to Eswatini was later sent to his home nation of Jamaica, where government officials said they had never told the US that they were unwilling to accept him.
“As a result, the Trump Administration has, in some cases, paid twice for migrants’ travel - once to remove them to a third country and then again to fly them to their home country,” the report says.
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