BURSTThe Trump administration appears to be laying the groundwork for a global gulag for expelled immigrants.
In addition to using longtime U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the Trump administration is seeking more far-flung locales to hold deported people, regardless of their countries of origin.
The U.S. is already using the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, and has its sights set on numerous other countries, including many that the State Department has excoriated for human rights abuses. The U.S. has reportedly explored, sought, or struck deals with at least 19 countries: Angola, Benin, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Kosovo, Libya, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Panama, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
“These are the plans of an authoritarian regime. They want to spend likely billions of taxpayer dollars to send asylum-seekers into war zones or to countries rife with human rights abuses,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told The Intercept.
“It’s truly alarming that this administration doesn’t view people fleeing persecution or torture as human and that the United States government is even discussing this obviously illegal proposal. It’s deeply un-American, will make all Americans less safe, and will, without a doubt, result in the loss of human life,” Murphy said.
“It’s deeply un-American, will make all Americans less safe, and will, without a doubt, result in the loss of human life,”
The State Department refused to provide a complete list of countries with which the U.S. has made agreements to accept deportees from other countries — often referred to as third-country nationals — citing the sensitivity of diplomatic communications. But the Trump administration is planning a major increase in deportation flights in coming weeks to destinations across the globe, according to a government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, as well as published reports.
In remarks outside the White House on Friday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller offered a glimpse of the global scope of deportations. “We send planes to Iraq. We send planes to Yemen. We send planes to Haiti. We send planes to Angola,” he said. “I mean, ICE is sending planes all over the world all the time. Anyone who came here illegally, we’re finding them and we’re getting them out.”
The White House did not respond to a request for clarification about which countries are receiving third-country nationals.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration created a worldwide network of secret prisons and torture sites as part of its global war on terror. Its crown jewel, the Guantánamo Bay detention center, was established in January 2002 as a place for the United States to hold so-called enemy combatants.
The U.S. government chose the U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay because it was seeking a site where neither U.S. nor international law applied — a legal black hole where they could disappear people indefinitely. Over time, Guantánamo became emblematic of gross human rights abuses. “Forever prisoners” of the war on terror are still being held there today. Others caught up in America’s counterterrorism dragnet were detained at torture prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq or kidnapped and “rendered” to CIA black sites — secret prisons in at least eight countries around the world.
As the Trump administration has expanded the Bush and Obama-era terrorism paradigm to cast immigrants and refugees as terrorists and gang members, it has reconceptualized rendition and even pressed Guantánamo Bay into service as a way station for Venezuelan men expelled to El Salvador.
“In many ways, this is a retread of some of the practices of the second Bush administration in terms of extraordinary rendition abroad; the RDI program, rendition, detention, and interrogation — the formal name for their torture program,” said Brian Finucane, who worked for a decade in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the Department of State where he advised the U.S. government on counterterrorism and other military matters. “Using the counterterrorism model, the Trump administration believes it provides it with broad authority to ride roughshod over civil rights.”
In March, the Trump administration used the Alien Enemies Act to deny due process to more than 250 Venezuelan and Salvadoran men, transferring them to El Salvador despite the objections of a federal judge. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, disappeared the men into the country’s shadowy prison system, which is rife with abuse, torture, and other human rights violations, according to human rights groups. The Trump administration’s suspension of rights mirrors Bukele’s own violation of democratic norms. Since 2022, the country has been under a state of emergency where most civil rights have been suspended to conduct mass arrests to crack down on the country’s gangs. The dragnet has led to the arbitrary imprisonment of thousands of people wrongfully accused of being gang members.
In similar fashion, the Trump administration accused the expelled Venezuelan men of being members of a gang called Tren de Aragua with little to no evidence. Even Bukele had reason to doubt the evidence provided by the Trump administration, according to a New York Times investigation. Other media investigations have also revealed the vast majority of the men did not have criminal records.
The Supreme Court has already ruled unanimously that it was illegal for the Trump administration to send one of the men, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to CECOT, and ordered his release and return to the U.S. The Trump and Bukele administrations have ignored this decision. Garcia is now being held at another facility in El Salvador.
In addition to imprisoning third-country nationals in El Salvador, the U.S. has also expelled hundreds of African and Asian immigrants to Costa Rica and Panama, including people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Uzbekistan, for its part, received more than 100 deportees from the United States, including not only Uzbeks but citizens of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, according to a statement by the Department of Homeland Security released late last month.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also said her government had accepted roughly 6,000 non-Mexicans from the U.S., since Trump took office again, for “humanitarian reasons.” Unlike in El Salvador, people expelled to these countries are likely not being held indefinitely in detention centers, but details on the fate of many are scant.
The Trump administration is currently seeking more countries in Asia to accept expelled immigrants from elsewhere in the world, according to Sean O’Neill, the senior bureau official for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the Department of State. “We do have discussions with other countries who agree to take third country national deportees,” he said at a press briefing last week, noting that the U.S. is “working closely with countries in the region who are willing to accept third-country nationals with final orders of removal — in other words, folks who are not actually from that country.”
A State Department spokesperson also told The Intercept that “U.S. partners and regional leaders are working closely with us to end the crisis of illegal and mass migration.” One area of collaboration seems to be finding dangerous places to send vulnerable people.
Last week, the Trump administration was poised to send immigrants from the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, and Mexico, among other countries. to Libya and possibly Saudi Arabia. Experts say that the plan to deport immigrants to Libya – a war-ravaged nation that descended into violence after the U.S. helped to overthrow its government in 2011 and is known for widespread mistreatment of migrants and refugees — would represent not only a gross human rights violation but also a brazen act of defiance toward the federal judiciary.
“It seems like they’re actually removing them to a country with the intent of causing harm.”
“There are provisions in immigration law to send somebody to a third country. We’ve done that in the past. We’ve made arrangements with Ecuador, for example, to take Palestinian nationals who we can’t send back because they’re stateless, with assurances that they are not in danger in that third country,” said Michelle Brané, the former Immigration Detention Ombudsman at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “But not only do these current cases fall outside of that category, but it seems like they’re actually removing them to a country with the intent of causing harm.”
Libya operates numerous detention facilities for immigrants on behalf of European nations. Amnesty International called these prisons a “hellscape” in a 2021 report, saying it had found evidence that adults and children were subjected to “arbitrary detention and systematically subjected to torture, sexual violence, forced labour and other exploitation with total impunity.” The most recent State Department report on human rights in Libya criticized its “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions” and cited numerous analyses which found “migrants routinely experienced unlawful killings, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual exploitation, and other abuses”; that perpetrators included “state officials”; and that “various U.N. entities documented human rights abuses committed against migrants in detention centers throughout the year.”
The European Union, and member states like Italy and France, have long provided assistance to Libya to thwart immigration to Europe, including support for its network of brutal immigrant prisons.
“Libya has served as a detention center for countries in Europe, Italy in particular. So the U.S. may be looking at that for a model,” said Finucane, who worked on U.S.-Libyan security cooperation for the State Department and is now the senior adviser for the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group. “It has, of course, a terrible reputation in terms of human rights treatment of immigrants, and there’s been reporting on this from the U.N. and many others. But based on this administration’s use of CECOT in El Salvador, brutal prison conditions may be the point.”
Last month, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy (no relation to the senator) issued a preliminary injunction barring the Trump administration from deporting noncitizens to third countries without due process and without allowing them to demonstrate whether they are in danger of persecution, bodily harm, or death if they are sent.
In the face of reports of impending expulsions to Libya, Murphy followed up last Wednesday with an order clarifying that “the allegedly imminent removals, as reported by news agencies and as plaintiffs seek to corroborate with class-member accounts and public information, would clearly violate this court’s order.”
“The Trump Administration’s plan to send migrants to Libya is unconscionable, cruel, and blatantly illegal. This decision flies in the face of basic morality. Sending migrants to a country that they didn’t come from and where they could face torture and inhumane treatment is appalling and criminal,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. “No human being should be subjected to these horrific conditions. There is no doubt that these migrants will have their lives put at severe risk.”
During a Senate subcommittee meeting with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem last week, Sen. Murphy tore into the reported Libya deportation plans. The country is considered too dangerous even for U.S. diplomats, he observed, and American citizens are advised not to travel there. “Libya is in the middle of a civil war,” he said. “Sending migrants with pending asylum claims into a war zone just because it’s cruel is so deeply disturbing.”
President Donald Trump claimed not to know whether he planned to deport hundreds of immigrants to Libya, amid reports that his administration was poised to do so. When asked whether the administration was sending migrants to Libya last week, Trump said, “I don’t know,” then instructed reporters to ask the Department of Homeland Security.
Multiple requests for comment by The Intercept to DHS, citing Trump’s advice, went unanswered.
Libya is not the only war zone that the Trump administration has eyed as a suitable site for immigrant expulsion. Earlier this year, the administration asked Ukraine to accept third-country nationals, according to reporting by the Washington Post. There is no indication that Ukraine agreed to this extraordinary request, however. The State Department refused to offer clarification, claiming — falsely — that they do not discuss diplomatic communications with other governments.
The Trump administration is also combing Africa for nations that will accept third-country nationals, including Benin, a West African nation that is increasingly beset by Islamist militant violence, and Equatorial Guinea, a notorious kleptocracy led by a brutal tyrant.
Further east, the U.S. is courting another government led by a strongman. Rwanda’s foreign minister, Olivier J.P. Nduhungirehe, recently disclosed that his country was in “early stage” talks with the Trump administration to accept expelled immigrants from America. “These talks are still ongoing,” he told Rwanda TV, the state broadcaster.
The U.S. made a one-time payment of $100,000 to the Rwandan government last month to accept an Iraqi national with the proviso that the African nation would admit 10 more third-country nationals as part of a “durable program” for accepting other expelled immigrants, according to reporting by the Washington Post.
Rwanda has a long history of taking in refugees from Africa and elsewhere and striking deals with European nations, like Denmark and the United Kingdom, to accept deported asylum-seekers and immigrants. While Rwanda frames the policy as altruistic, many experts say it is rooted in efforts to profit financially and geopolitically and induce Western governments to ignore Rwanda’s antidemocratic government, its support for a brutal rebel group and illegal mining in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, and the nation’s woeful human rights record.
The most recent State Department report on human rights in Rwanda details significant issues including “extrajudicial killings; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; [and] political prisoners or detainees,” among many other violations.
The State Department refused to comment on ongoing negotiations with Rwanda. ”We do not discuss the details of our diplomatic communications with other governments,” a spokesperson told The Intercept.
“Ongoing engagement with foreign governments is vital to deterring illegal and mass migration and securing our borders, which are top Trump Administration priorities,” a State Department spokesperson told The Intercept by email. This engagement increasingly looks like an effort to frighten immigrants with the prospect of exile in far-off, and sometimes exceptionally dangerous, countries.
Brané, the former Immigration Detention Ombudsman, says that the Trump administration is weaponizing the deportation process, wielding it as a cudgel as it also pushes a self-deportation scheme. In March, the Department of Homeland Security announced a program to induce undocumented immigrants to turn themselves in through an app and “self-deport” in exchange for travel assistance and a stipend of $1,000, paid after their return to their home country.
“Transfers to third countries are not intended to be a punishment or a deterrent. But I think they’re looking at it as a punishment, like retribution — punishing people, without having gone through due process. They’re saying, ‘You violate our rules, we’re going to really make you suffer,’” Brané told The Intercept, referring to the Trump administration. “They see these removals as a way to scare people, to deter them from coming, but also to move them toward self-removal or self-deportation. It’s not a coincidence that they are pairing it with this campaign of ‘Leave now or we’ll come after you.’”
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