Rabbiatu Kuyateh considers the United States her country: “I've known it as my home”, she said. It isn’t where she was born, however: she was born and raised in Sierra Leone but fled the civil war there in the 90s. She has now lived in the United States for more than 30 years and has raised her own family there.
Kuyateh is a nurse and, throughout this time, she had a series of renewable work permits and never obtained permanent residency. But in early July 2025, she was detained during a routine appointment with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Baltimore, Maryland. After spending four months in detention, she learned that she was going to be deported to Ghana, more than 1,000 km from her country of origin.
I’m not from Ghana; what am I going to do there? I only saw Ghana on the map; I don’t know where that is, ” she told the consortium. **More than 25,000 people have been expelled to third countries** Since Donald Trump took office in January 2025, more than 25,000 people have been deported to a country that is not their home country and with which they often have no ties, according to a count carried out by a team of 26 international media outlets led by Forbidden Stories. A large majority– 20,000 people– were deported to Mexico.
Others – at least 5,447 people –had, by August 31, 2026, been taken on deportation flights and dropped all across the globe. These “third-country removals” have become a core part of the Trump administration’s repressive migration policy. In recent months, they have been making an increasing number of deportation agreements with third countries, often under a cloak of secrecy.
There has been very little official communication about these deportations. But over the past year, the government has been very opaque about these third-country transfers,” said Savi Arvey, director of Policy, Refugee & Immigrant Rights at the NGO Human Rights First. To “shed light on these transfers”, the organisation relies on public flight-tracking data, as well as a network of NGOs, lawyers and on-the-ground sources.
It shares its findings through the ICE Flight Monitor project, which monitors these deportation transfers, and the Third Country Deportation Watch tracker, developed with the NGO Refugees International. Our investigation is based on their work, as well as that of the Human Rights Center at the University of Berkeley, freedom of information requests, and information gathered by journalists around the world and the lawyers of the people who have been deported. We were able to document a large number of these deportations and gather information on the number and nationality of those deported (see our methodology here). **Deportation agreements concluded with 35 countries on six continents** A total of 28 countries located on six different continents had received third-country deportees from the United States by August 31, 2026.
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