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The US has pledged at least $410 million to deport migrants to third countries

September 21, 2026

Internal government records show the Trump administration had authorized or pledged at least $410 million by the end of June for deportation deals with 31 countries.

Under third-country deportation deals, the US sends migrants who hold final removal orders to countries other than their own, including many whom federal law protects from return to homelands where they would likely be persecuted.

Key facts

The Washington Post reports that internal government records show the Trump administration had approved or pledged at least $410 million by the end of June for deportation agreements with 31 countries, largely in Africa and Latin America. The documents put the Eswatini arrangement at $5.1 million, paid directly, for as many as 150 deportees, and 19 migrants have been sent there. A State Department map of the continent, dated March 2026, shows deportation agreements with 13 of the 49 African countries that US officials had approached, and the documents show most of the deportation slots in third countries still empty. People familiar with the deals tell The Washington Post that the payments have largely taken the place of the voluntary contributions the US once gave global aid organizations, and that the contracts were written to avoid statutory requirements, human rights safeguards among them, that normally attach to foreign assistance spending. Under a model called Third Country National Arrangements, binding guarantees on asylum and human rights give way to verbal assurances traded through diplomatic notes. The Washington Post centers its account on how a refugee bureau came to negotiate the deportation deals, and a former official who quit the State Department over the policy says the administration wanted money moved quickly and without conditions.

France 24, which spent six months on the investigation within a 26-outlet media consortium, centers its account on Cameroon and the deportees there whose futures are uncertain. France 24 reports, citing a source near the government in Yaoundé, that the two countries reached an agreement before the first deportations, with President Paul Biya apparently handling the talks himself. The only public document on the deal is a December 2025 exchange of diplomatic notes, which the US State Department published in June, and deportees in Yaoundé allege that US authorities took their passports and have kept them. The Guardian reports that $30m was set aside for Cameroon to support UN operations there in return for taking 1,000 migrants, and that deportations surged again in August, when 16 flights, a record by the count of Human Rights First, took people to 13 countries other than their own. Citing the records The Washington Post reviewed, The Guardian gives the pledges as at least $410m for agreements with 35 countries, nearly a third of them African. The Washington Post reports allegations, made in interviews and court filings, that armed guards beat deported migrants, withheld food and kept them from lawyers and relatives. Tin Nguyen, a lawyer for Vietnamese and Laotian men sent to Eswatini and South Sudan, likens the system to human trafficking. “The Trump administration is well aware of the legal arguments against this policy, but they’re storming forward anyway,” said Trina Realmuto, who heads the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, co-counsel for the plaintiffs. The Guardian carries the view of Alma David, an immigration lawyer who tracks the policy. “I would describe [this] as the Trump administration’s way of trying to undermine the concept of asylum and refugee protection,” she said. The administration says the people it deports are criminals, and the UN says it helps migrants reach local asylum protections and keeps them from being sent on to places where they could be harmed.

The accounts measure US money for the International Organization for Migration in different ways. One describes drastic cuts to annual US contributions to the IOM and to the UN for refugee programs after last year's foreign aid review, leaving the IOM with a 30 percent budget shortfall and the UN with a 24 percent one, alongside pledged grants of $179 million for the IOM and $124 million for the UN Refugee Agency to fund projects in the third countries. Another, drawing on a federal database that tracks spending, finds that of the US grants to the IOM in Trump's second term, more than 60% went to programs in countries that take in deportees, and it counts the Central African Republic among 13 host countries where the IOM supports deportees on arrival. One measures the size of the cuts and the other where the remaining grants went, so the figures describe different things. The deportation totals also count different things. One account cites about 20,000 people bussed to Mexico, by a count from Refugees International and Human Rights First, and another counts more than 25,000 people deported across at least 28 third countries, using data that include a tracking site the same two groups run. The outlets differ in emphasis rather than fact. The Washington Post leads with the money and the bureau behind the deals, France 24 with the deportees in Cameroon, and The Guardian with individual deportees and the part UN agencies play. France 24, The Guardian and The Washington Post agree on the pledges, the African deals and the migrants' accounts of their treatment. The full count of deportations to third countries is still forming.

“Our commitment in no way constitutes an endorsement of the decisions that led to the deportation of these people,” a spokesperson said.

a spokesperson

Still developing

The count of people deported to third countries is still forming, and the documents show most of the deportation slots in those countries unfilled.

How settled the reporting is

Reported 95% · Contested 2% · Developing 3%

Sources

Toggle read the full reports of all 3 outlets counted on this event.