Across the United States, thousands of asylum seekers who built stable lives while waiting for their claims to be adjudicated now face an unprecedented and uncertain future, after receiving sudden deportation orders to distant nations they have no connection to. From an Afghan refugee who fled Taliban rule and resettled in upstate New York to a Cuban restaurant worker in Texas arrested following a minor traffic collision, the impacted migrants come from every corner of the globe. A Mauritanian resident of Michigan was ordered to Uganda; a Venezuelan mother in Ohio faces removal to Ecuador; dozens of Bolivian, Ecuadorian, and other migrants have been sent to Honduras.
Advocacy group Mobile Pathways, which advocates for full transparency in U.S. immigration proceedings, confirms these cases are part of a far larger policy push: more than 13,000 legally residing asylum seekers have received so-called third-country deportation orders, sending them to nations where nearly all have no familial, cultural, or social ties. Yet despite the Biden White House’s aggressive push to expand immigrant expulsions, very few of these orders have actually been carried out. Instead, thousands of migrants are trapped in a sprawling immigration limbo: they cannot argue their asylum claims in U.S. courts, have lost their legal right to work, and live in constant fear of being suddenly detained and deported to a country they have never even visited.
Immigration rights advocates say this uncertainty is no accident. According to Cassandra Charles, senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, which has challenged the mass third-country deportation policy, the administration’s core goal is to instill widespread fear in migrant communities. The threat of removal to an unfamiliar, potentially dangerous nation, Charles argues, is designed to pressure asylum seekers to abandon their claims and voluntarily return to their home countries — even if those home countries put their lives at risk.
In mid-March, an internal shift was revealed. An email from top Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) legal leaders to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) field attorneys, obtained by The Associated Press, ordered a halt to new third-country deportation motions in asylum cases. No explanation was provided for the order, which has not been publicly released, and DHS declined repeated requests to confirm whether the pause is permanent. All existing deportation cases, however, are moving forward, leaving thousands still in legal purgatory.
One Guatemalan asylum-seeker, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, described the crippling fear her case has sparked. In 2024, she crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with her 4-year-old daughter after being held captive and repeatedly sexually assaulted by gang members, later discovering she was pregnant from one of her attacks. She had regained hope after arriving in the U.S., she said — until an ICE attorney requested her deportation not to her home country of Guatemala, but to one of three distant nations: Ecuador, Honduras, or Uganda. She had never even heard of Ecuador or Uganda before her hearing, she said. “When I arrived in this country, I was filled with hope again and I thanked God for being alive,” she said, tears in her eyes. “When I think about having to go to those other countries, I panic because I hear they are violent and dangerous.”
The third-country deportation push first launched last summer, when ICE attorneys — who act as prosecutors in the U.S. immigration court system — received instructions to file “pretermission” motions that terminate asylum claims and clear the way for removal to third nations. Sarah Mehta, an immigration policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, notes that these motions do not argue that the migrant does not have a valid asylum claim — they simply seek to dismiss the entire case and remove the person to another country entirely. The pace of orders accelerated sharply in October, after a precedent-setting ruling from the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals. The three-judge panel, two of whom were appointed by former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and one a holdover from the first Trump administration, ruled that asylum seekers could be removed to any third nation the U.S. State Department certifies will not persecute or torture them. The ruling cleared legal barriers to the policy, and the administration rapidly expanded the practice.
Mobile Pathways data shows more than 13,000 asylum seekers have now had their cases canceled and received third-country deportation orders. More than half of these orders target Honduras, Ecuador, or Uganda, with the remainder spread across more than 30 other nations. Theoretically, deported migrants are allowed to pursue asylum claims in the receiving third countries, though many of these nations have underfunded, barely functional asylum systems that can barely handle their own existing claims backlogs.
Despite the thousands of orders, actual deportations have been far rarer than the administration anticipated. Rights groups Refugees International and Human Rights First’s Third Country Deportation Watch tracker estimates that fewer than 100 of the 13,000 ordered migrants have actually been deported. In a statement to the AP, a DHS spokesperson defended the policy, framing the third-country arrangements, known as Asylum Cooperative Agreements, as “lawful bilateral arrangements that allow illegal aliens seeking asylum in the United States to pursue protection in a partner country that has agreed to fairly adjudicate their claims.” The spokesperson added that DHS is “using every lawful tool available to address the backlog and abuse of the asylum system,” pointing to the roughly 2 million pending asylum cases clogging the U.S. immigration court system.
But the policy has hit unforeseen logistical, legal, and diplomatic barriers that have slowed deportations to a crawl. For example, Mobile Pathways data shows thousands of migrants have been ordered deported to Honduras, but the bilateral agreement between Washington and Tegucigalopa only allows the Central American nation to accept 10 such deportees per month over a 24-month period. Even more striking, dozens of migrants ordered deported to Honduras do not speak Spanish — the country’s official language — with native languages ranging from English to Uzbek to French.
Uganda, which has received hundreds of deportation orders for asylum seekers, has yet to take in a single deportee, according to a top Ugandan government official. Okello Oryem, Uganda’s minister of state for foreign affairs, told the AP that U.S. authorities have delayed deportations while conducting cost-benefit analyses, noting that small groups of one or two deportees per flight are not economically viable. “You can’t be doing one, two people at a time,” Oryem said. “Planeloads — that is the most effective way.”
Many immigration advocates suspect the March halt to new deportation motions signals a shift in strategy, rather than an end to the policy. “Right now they haven’t been able to remove that many people,” the ACLU’s Mehta said. “I do think that will change. They’re in a hiring spree right now. They will have more planes. If they get more agreements, they’ll be able to send more people to more countries.” Until that shift, thousands of asylum seekers will remain trapped between two systems, stripped of the right to work and build lives in the U.S., with no clear timeline for when — or if — they will be sent to an unfamiliar country halfway across the world.
The Associated Press reporting on this story included contributions from correspondents Garance Burke in San Francisco, Joshua Goodman in Miami, Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, Marlon González in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Molly A. Wallace in Chicago.