Why the Trump administration is struggling to deport migrants to unfamiliar countries

By Priscilla Alvarez, Michael Williams, CNN

(CNN) — On a recent April morning, Stephen Miller led a multiagency call with a question: Why were countries not accepting more deportees from the United States?

In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the architect of his immigration agenda had overseen a deportation machine that according to the Department of Homeland Security has expelled more than 675,000 undocumented immigrants from the country.

That is short of the administration’s goal of a million deportations a year, though Homeland Security officials argue that hundreds of thousands of others have voluntarily left the country.

So, in an effort to circumvent some countries that declined to accept back their citizens, the administration devised a plan to enter into agreements with other countries to accept deportees regardless of whether they were from those countries, or even spoke the language.

Yet even as around two dozen countries — spanning from Africa and Central Asia to Latin America — continued entering into agreements or memorandums of understanding to accept deportees from the US, that plan has accounted for only a tiny fraction of deportations.

The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that 15,000 people have been deported to third countries —13,000 of whom were sent to Mexico—between January and December 2025. The agreements for each country vary, with some offering more detail than others, including parameters on who will be accepted.

“The Trump Administration is using all the tools in our toolbox to carry out the largest, lawful deportation operation of criminal illegal aliens in history,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told CNN in a statement. The State Department similarly said in a statement that “implementing the Trump Administration’s immigration policies is a top priority for the Department of State.”

The only country that has accepted a significant number of deported migrants from other countries is Mexico, and that is through an arrangement that began during President Joe Biden’s administration. Some countries entered agreements, but it is not publicly known whether they have accepted any migrants.

Miller appeared frustrated on the call and directed his ire to State Department officials, according to two US officials. Despite striking all these arrangements with far-flung countries to accept migrants from the United States, the removal of immigrants to those countries appeared to have stalled — or to have never actually begun.

His message to the officials was clear: If they couldn’t get countries to move faster and accept more people, he would get involved.

“He’s at his wit’s end about it,” one of the US officials said.

A White House official told CNN there have been no internal complaints about the pace of the program but instead conversations about working with additional countries on third-country removal agreements, arguing that such arrangements have allowed the US to remove immigrants with criminal histories whose origin countries won’t accept them.

A different vision

The intense push behind lining up countries to accept deportees from the US is a critical part of the Trump administration’s aggressive strategy to achieve the president’s campaign promise of mass deportation.

The US has historically faced challenges in deporting certain nationalities back to their origin countries — either due to frosty diplomatic relations between the US and those countries, or the criminal histories of some of the citizens the US was asking those countries to take back.

The administration’s push to deport migrants to third countries is meant to serve two purposes: bypassing the cooperation of countries that wouldn’t work with the US, and serving as a deterrent for migrants thinking about entering the US illegally, lest they be sent to an unfamiliar country thousands of miles away from home.

About 13,000 non-Mexican nationals were sent by the US to Mexico during the first year of Trump’s term, and likely a few thousand more already this year, according to data kept by Refugees International and Human Rights First.

This arrangement is an extension of a program that began under Biden’s administration, which in 2022 announced it would expel the surging number of Venezuelan migrants who crossed the southern border at the time back to Mexico.

“The informal agreement with Mexico continues, and that’s where the vast majority of third-country nationals have actually been deported,” said Yael Schacher, the Americas and Europe director of Refugees International.

Under the agreements, countries agree — often for money, political favor or both — to accept immigrants from the US who are not citizens of those countries. Many of the efforts to deport these third-country nationals have been met with legal challenges.

Aside from Mexico, other countries have accepted, at most, a few hundred deportees — such as El Salvador, Panama, Costa Rica and Uzbekistan, according to the tally from Refugees International and Human Rights First.

Countries like Eswatini, Guatemala and Equatorial Guinea have each accepted a handful to several dozen migrants, while fewer than 10 appear to have been sent to Rwanda, South Sudan and Kosovo.

More than 10 countries who seem to have arrangements or agreements are not publicly known to have accepted any deportees. That doesn’t include the Democratic Republic of Congo, which announced its own agreement with the US just this month.

The State Department spokesperson declined to comment on diplomatic communications with other governments.

The agreements primarily come in two forms: through arrangements where people with final orders of removal are being deported to the third countries, and through Asylum Cooperative Agreements, where asylum seekers who have had their claims terminated in the United States are being sent to seek asylum in other countries.

‘Little measurable impact’

Efforts by the Trump administration to deport migrants to unfamiliar countries began early in Trump’s second term. In March 2025, the US — invoking a wartime authority under the 18th century Alien Enemies Act — began deporting hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, where they were locked up in that country’s notorious maximum security CECOT prison.

By the summer, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US was “actively searching for other countries to take people from third countries.”

“We are working with other countries to say, ‘We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries — will you do that as a favor to us?’ And the further away from America, the better, so they can’t come back across the border,” he said.

Another high-profile attempt occurred last year when a group of migrants, initially bound for South Sudan, were detained by the US at a military base in Djibouti. The migrants, including some from Cuba, Vietnam and Laos, were held in a converted Conex shipping container. That prompted a lawsuit and eventually the case made it to the Supreme Court, which allowed the US to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their homeland with minimal notice.

There was also the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration has repeatedly tried deporting to Africa ever since the Salvadoran immigrant returned from his detention at the mega prison in El Salvador, where judges previously ruled he should not be deported.

In February, Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a report describing the costs associated with third-country removals. It found the administration has “has spent tens of millions of dollars to move a relatively small number of migrants to third countries, in some cases paying more than one million dollars per person.”

The program, according to the report, had “little measurable impact” on the administration’s deportation agenda.

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