Since early 2025, the U.S. government has entered into dozens of agreements with other governments, under which the United States forcibly sends immigrants to countries with which they have no ties and where they may face grave human rights violations. An initiative by Human Rights First and Refugees International, Banished by Bargain: Third Country Deportation Watch, tracks this growing web of opaque agreements and the devastating harms they inflict on immigrants—including people who fled to the United States to escape persecution and torture— upon their arrival in third countries.
The Trump administration’s forced transfer agreements include at least eight “Asylum Cooperative Agreements” (ACAs) with Belize, Cabo Verde, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Liberia, Paraguay, and Uganda.1 The administration claims to have concluded these agreements pursuant to the “safe third country” provision of the asylum statute, but they do not meet the congressionally-mandated requirements for such agreements.2 Under these ACAs, the U.S. government forcibly sends people to third countries without a chance to have their asylum case considered in the United States, ostensibly based upon the third country’s assertions that they will have the opportunity to seek asylum there.3 However, the assumption underlying the ACAs—that people seeking asylum can safely seek and obtain protection in the designated third countries—is unsupported by evidence. Rather, many of these countries lack adequate asylum systems and may present significant risks to individuals seeking asylum, including refoulement, violence, and other harms.
This report focuses on the current administration’s systematic use of ACAs as a pretext to “pretermit,” or summarily reject, the asylum cases of tens of thousands of people with pending immigration court cases, without the immigration judge holding a merits hearing to formally review the asylum application and consider the submitted evidence and the applicant’s testimony. When an asylum applicant’s case is pretermitted, they are ordered removed to one or more third countries with which the United States has an ACA. The report documents the stories of Human Rights First’s clients and other asylum seekers whose cases have been pretermitted on the basis of the ACAs under the second Trump administration, including people who fled persecution due to their sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, political opinion, and Indigenous identity. Their stories illustrate the ways in which pretermission of asylum cases violates due process rights and protections under U.S. asylum law. These summary asylum denials immediately destabilize the lives of individuals and families across the country, subjecting them to prolonged detention, removal, loss of employment, and constant fear.
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