By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Trump administration flew more than 100 deportees to eight African nations in about ten days, part of a fast-widening push to send migrants to countries that are not their own.

Third-country removal is how the administration deports people whose home nations will not take them back or who have won protection from return. The tactic is scaling fast, and it is testing how far the government’s removal power reaches. Where does it stand?

By the numbers

More than 100 deportees were sent to eight African countries over roughly 10 days, internal documents show: Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

The deportees are a global mix. They came from Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Nepal, Nicaragua, Turkey, and Venezuela, among others, sent to African nations with which they have no tie.

More than 30 nations have agreed to take them. The administration has built a network of third-country deals to absorb migrants their home governments will not.

How it works

• The legal hook is a failed home-country removal. When a migrant wins a court order barring return to his own country, the government says it is required to find another willing to take him, and a third country becomes the destination.
• One flight showed the friction. On a run to Liberia, five deportees refused to leave the plane and were rerouted onward to Equatorial Guinea.

The receipts

• The Supreme Court cleared the way. In 2025, the justices let the administration resume third-country removals without the advance notice that a lower court had demanded, over the dissent of the three liberal justices.
• The network is deliberately broad. The administration has lined up agreements with more than 30 countries, roughly a dozen of them African, so that a migrant whose home government will not accept them still has somewhere to be sent. Eswatini and South Sudan were among the earlier destinations before the Africa push widened.
• The administration’s rationale is the rule of law. A DHS spokesman framed it directly: “If an illegal alien chooses to file a claim in court refusing to go to their home country, we are required by law to find a safe and secure nation for them to go to.”
• The courts are not finished. The policy is still being litigated in the United States, where a district court found an earlier version unlawful, and the fight over how far removal power reaches is ongoing.

The counter

This is enforcement finally having teeth. For decades, a migrant whose country refused him became permanently unremovable, free to stay by default. Third-country deals close that loophole and restore the government’s ability to carry out a lawful removal order. For an audience that watched the border collapse, that is the system working.

The caution is process, not principle. Sending a Cuban or an Afghan to a nation he has never seen raises fair questions about what happens after the plane lands, and courts are still weighing the policy’s limits. Removal power without a floor of due process is a power that will eventually be turned on someone who deserves a hearing.

Sovereign nations get to decide who stays, and a country that cannot enforce its own removal orders does not control its borders. The line to hold is that deportation is the enforcement of law, not a way to disappear a problem.

-The Editors

National Security · Upstream of the Swamp · September 1, 2026

Sourced from PRICKLY PEAR