On September 21, 2026, a consortium of more than two dozen news organizations coordinated by the Paris nonprofit Forbidden Stories published The Deportation Project, a six-month investigation of the agreements under which the United States sends deportees to countries they are not from. The Washington Post, which obtained internal State Department records, reported that the administration “has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate agreements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, as of the end of June.” The Post says the documents had not been reported before.
The money is pledged, not spent, and most of it does not go to foreign governments. The Post's breakdown: “$81 million in direct payments to 13 of the foreign governments,” plus “$179 million to the International Organization for Migration and $124 million to the U.N. Refugee Agency.” The per-country terms in the records include $85 million tied to the Central African Republic, $75 million to the Democratic Republic of Congo for up to 2,000 people, $30 million to Cameroon for up to 1,000, and $7.5 million to the government of Equatorial Guinea for up to 250, which matches the figure already reported for that deal (see The United States Is Paying $7.5 Million to Send Deportees to a Hotel Owned by a Dictator's Family, Where Lawyers Say Two Men Were Bound, Hooded and Beaten).
The work is run from an unlikely place. The Post reports that the agreements “have been secured under the orders of Stephen Miller” and negotiated by a new Office of Remigration, about 15 people inside the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, the bureau that historically resettled refugees. Andrew Veprek, the official who oversaw it, told a Center for Immigration Studies audience in April, “We have changed the orientation of the bureau completely.” According to current and former officials who spoke to the Post anonymously, the arrangements replace binding safe-third-country agreements with verbal assurances in diplomatic notes and were “designed to bypass statutory requirements, including human rights safeguards.” One former State official told the Post, “The whole point was to circumvent [congressional] notification that money was being sent to a government known to be corrupt.” Those characterizations rest on unnamed sources.
The scale, by the consortium's count: “at least 25,447 such people had been sent across 28 countries” as of August 31, 2026. About 20,000 of them were bused to Mexico under an informal arrangement, and more than 5,000 were flown to countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Central Asia. These are counts by journalists and advocacy groups, not government figures, and they are a small share of total deportations. Thirty-five countries have now signed agreements. The Guardian found that a majority of them “have said they will not accept migrants with violent criminal records,” which sits awkwardly with the administration's description of the program.
The Guardian's reporting follows individuals. A 32-year-old Iranian woman, identified by a pseudonym, had been granted protection from removal to Iran and was released by a judge in May. She was re-arrested at an ICE check-in on June 8 and flown three days later, with 17 others and without her passport, to the Central African Republic, where she contracted malaria. “They never told me they were going to deport me [to] this country,” she said. Her lawyer, Sahar Jalili, said of the ICE officers, “They told me that they had respected the judge's order to release her. But they'd never promised not to send her to a third country.” The abuses documented abroad, in Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and elsewhere, were committed by foreign authorities rather than by U.S. personnel; the American decision is the choice to send people there.
The administration's response: White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said of the office's name, “Not everything you dislike is racist. Remigrate literally means to migrate back. By returning illegal aliens to their origin country, we are simply enforcing our nation's laws.” She said the “only illegal aliens going to third countries are those whose home countries won't accept them including dangerous criminals or illegal aliens with orders of removal who have asked to not be removed to their home country.” The State Department told the Post it had mischaracterized the work of the named officials, and said, “The US government will use all legal means to remove those with no right to remain in our country.” Miller and the officials named did not comment.
Three days before the investigation ran, the First Circuit held that the process used for these removals violates federal law, though its ruling is not yet in effect (see Courts Found Trump's Third-Country Deportation Process Unlawful, and the Supreme Court Let It Resume While It Takes Up the Case).