In the US, investigating the brutal methods of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can expose journalists to legal action, detention and even deportation. On June 14, 2025, Salvadoran reporter Mario Guevara experienced those risks firsthand. Guevara was detained while covering a protest against ICE in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of broader demonstrations against US President Donald Trump.
He was deported to El Salvador four months later. To continue and to defend this crucial work, the Forbidden Stories network of journalists launched a wide-reaching investigation called “The Deportation Project: Revelations about the Trump administration’s mass deportations”. More than a hundred interviews, 72 journalists, 15 countries Since January 2025, more than 25,400 foreigners have been deported from the US to countries that most of them have never set foot in before.
Most of them had been granted legal protections preventing them from being sent back to their home countries, where they were deemed at risk of persecution. To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading.
To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Cover image: The Deportation Project - Inside the Trump administration's secret deals to expel people worldwide © Forbidden Stories To get around this measure, the Trump administration struck deals with 35 “third countries” who would agree to receive these deportees. What these countries received in return remains largely unclear – the negotiations leading up to them were largely secret.
To dig deeper, a network of 72 journalists from 26 outlets across 15 countries spent six months gathering more than a hundred eyewitness accounts, including 33 interviews with migrants who were deported under the Trump administration’s policies. Out of the dozens of agreements signed by Washington, 12 were struck with African countries. This investigation reveals how these largely opaque negotiations were conducted to facilitate these deportations.
From Ghana to Cameroon to Eswatini, our journalists spent months following the stories of people abandoned in countries that were utterly unknown to them. Reporters +: 'ICE, Trump and Africa - Secret deals, broken lives' In this documentary, Karina Chabour follows in the footsteps of people deported to Ghana and Eswatini. Some of those people lived in the US for decades – they worked there, paid their taxes, started families and built their lives.Now, these newly stateless people risk detention, ill-treatment or being sent back to their home countries, where their lives would once again be in danger.
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