\n<\/p>\n
The Afghan man had fled the Taliban for refuge in upstate New York when U.S. immigration authorities ordered him deported to Uganda. The Cuban woman was working at a Texas Chick-fil-A when she arrested after a minor traffic accident and told she was being sent to Ecuador.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s the Mauritanian man living in Michigan told he\u2019d have to go to Uganda, the Venezuelan mother in Ohio told she’d be sent to Ecuador and the Bolivians, Ecuadorians and so many others across the country ordered sent to Honduras.<\/p>\n
They are among more than 13,000 immigrants who were living legally in the U.S., waiting for rulings on asylum claims, when they suddenly faced so-called third-country<\/a>deportation<\/a> orders, destined for countries where most had no ties<\/a>, according to the nonprofit group Mobile Pathways, which pushes for transparency in immigration proceedings.<\/p>\n Yet few have been deported, even as the White House pushes for ever more immigrant expulsions<\/a>. Thanks to unexplained changes in U.S. policy, many are now mired in immigration limbo, unable to argue their asylum<\/a> claims in court and unsure if they’ll be shackled and put on a deportation flight to a country they’ve never seen.<\/p>\n Some are in detention, though it\u2019s unclear how many. All have lost permission to work legally, a right most had while pursuing their asylum claims, compounding the worry and dread that has rippled through immigrant communities. <\/p>\n And that may be the point.<\/p>\n \u201cThis administration\u2019s goal is to instill fear into people. That\u2019s the primary thing,\u201d said Cassandra Charles, a senior staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, which has been fighting the Trump administration\u2019s mass deportation agenda. The fear of being deported to an unknown country could, advocates believe, drive migrants to abandon their immigration cases and decide to return to their home countries. <\/p>\n Things may be changing.<\/p>\n In mid-March, top Immigration and Customs Enforcement legal officials told field attorneys with the Department of Homeland Security in an email to stop filing new motions for third-country deportations tied to asylum cases. The email, which has been seen by The Associated Press, did not give a reason. It has not been publicly released, and DHS did not respond to requests to explain if the halt was permanent. <\/p>\n But the earlier deportation cases? Those are continuing.<\/p>\n In 2024, a Guatemalan woman who says she had been held captive and repeatedly sexually assaulted by members of powerful gang arrived with her 4-year-old daughter at the U.S.-Mexico border and asked for asylum. She later discovered she was pregnant with another child, conceived during a rape. <\/p>\n In December, she sat in a San Francisco immigration courtroom and listened as an ICE attorney sought to have her deported.<\/p>\n The ICE attorney didn’t ask the judge that she be sent back to Guatemala. Instead, the attorney said, the woman from the Indigenous Guatemalan highlands would go to one of three countries: Ecuador, Honduras or across the globe to Uganda. <\/p>\n Until that moment, she\u2019d never heard of Ecuador or Uganda.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I arrived in this country, I was filled with hope again and I thanked God for being alive,\u201d the woman said after the hearing, her eyes filling with tears. \u201cWhen I think about having to go to those other countries, I panic because I hear they are violent and dangerous.\u201d She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from U.S. immigration authorities or the Guatemalan gang network. <\/p>\n ICE attorneys, the de facto prosecutors in immigration courts, were first instructed last summer to file motions known as \u201cpretermissions\u201d that end migrants’ asylum claims and allow them to be deported.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re not saying the person doesn\u2019t have a claim,\u201d said Sarah Mehta, who tracks immigration issues at the American Civil Liberties Union. \u201cThey\u2019re just saying, ‘We\u2019re kicking this case completely out of court and we\u2019re going to send that person to another country.’\u201d <\/p>\n The pace of deportation orders picked up in October after a ruling from the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, which sets legal precedent inside the byzantine immigration court system.<\/p>\n The ruling from the three judges -\u2013 two appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the third a holdover from the first Trump administration — cleared the way for migrants seeking asylum to be removed to any third country where the U.S. State Department determines they won\u2019t face persecution or torture.<\/p>\n After the ruling, the government aggressively expanded the practice of ending asylum claims. <\/p>\n More than 13,000 migrants have been ordered deported to so-called \u201csafe third countries\u201d after their asylum cases were canceled, according to data from San Francisco-based Mobile Pathways. More than half the orders were for Honduras, Ecuador or Uganda, with the rest scattered among nearly three dozen other countries. <\/p>\n Deported migrants are free, at least theoretically, to pursue asylum and stay in those third countries, even if some have barely functioning asylum systems.<\/p>\n Immigration authorities have released little information about the third-country agreements, known as Asylum Cooperative Agreements, or the deportees, and it’s unclear exactly how many have been deported to third countries as part of asylum removals. <\/p>\n According to Third Country Deportation Watch, a tracker run by the rights groups Refugees International and Human Rights First, fewer than 100 of them are thought to have been deported. <\/p>\n In a statement, DHS called the agreements \u201dlawful 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.”<\/p>\n \u201cDHS is using every lawful tool available to address the backlog and abuse of the asylum system,\u201d said the statement, which was attributed only to a spokesperson. There are roughly 2 million backlogged asylum cases in the immigration system. <\/p>\n But deportations clearly turned out to be far more complicated than the government expected, restricted by a variety of legal challenges, the scope of the international agreements and a limited number of airplanes.<\/p>\n Mobile Pathways data, for example, shows that thousands of people have been ordered deported to Honduras \u2014 despite a diplomatic agreement that allows the country to take a total of just 10 such deportees per month for 24 months. Dozens of people ordered to Honduras in recent months did not speak Spanish as their primary language, but were native speakers of English, Uzbek and French, among other languages.<\/p>\n And while hundreds of asylum-seeking migrants have been ordered sent to Uganda, a top Ugandan official said none have arrived. U.S. authorities may be \u201cdoing a cost analysis\u201d and trying to avoid dispatching flights with only a few people on board, Okello Oryem, the Ugandan minister of state for foreign affairs, told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t be doing one, two people\u201d at a time,\u201d Oryem said. \u201cPlaneloads -\u2013 that is the most effective way.\u201d<\/p>\n Many immigration lawyers suspect that the March email ordering a halt in new asylum pretermissions could indicate a shift toward other forms of third-country deportations.<\/p>\n \u201cRight now they haven\u2019t been able to remove that many people,\u201d said the ACLU’s Mehta. \u201cI do think that will change.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re in a hiring spree right now. They will have more planes. If they get more agreements, they\u2019ll be able to send more people to more countries.\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n Associated Press reporters Garance Burke in San Francisco, Joshua Goodman in Miami, Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, Marlon Gonz\u00e1lez in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Molly A. Wallace in Chicago contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n