Detained in Latin America
After Trump took office on January 20, he and Rubio immediately focused on carrying out mass deportations.
The effort has widened with each passing month.
US diplomats in Washington and in embassies and consulates around the world have been telling their foreign counterparts that governments willing to accept expelled “third-country nationals” will win favour with the Trump administration, according to US officials with knowledge of the talks. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
The diplomats have had some success, notably with countries in Latin America.
In one of the most striking examples, Panama took about 300 deportees from Africa, Central Asia and elsewhere in February. They were first held in a hotel. Those who refused to board deportation flights to their home countries were then taken to a jungle camp. They were released after lawyers sued Panama’s government.
That same month, Costa Rica took 200 deportees, including citizens of China, India and Nepal, as well as a Yemeni family of three, according to State Department cables. By this week, 107 had returned to their countries of origin.
For deportees facing threats at home, Costa Rican diplomats have sought support from the United States to integrate the citizens into their society, arguing this would increase the country’s willingness to accept future deportees, one cable said.
In early April, the Trump administration deported a group of Mexican immigrants to Guatemala. But officials there said they were not expecting the arrivals and quickly arranged to have the group sent to Mexico.
US officials maintained that both countries were aware of the flight and that the deportation was a form of deterrence.
“If you enter unlawfully, you will be removed – and in a way that makes it far more difficult to try again,” McLaughlin said.
Guatemala’s Foreign Minister, Carlos Ramiro Martínez, told the Times this month that his country would accept deportees who are citizens of other Central American nations but would move quickly to send them home overland.
Next door, Honduras is allowing the United States to send Venezuelan immigrants to a military base there to put them on separate flights to Venezuela.
‘They shipped him off in the middle of the night and tried to disappear him into a third country that’s in the middle of a freaking civil war.’Ngoc Phan, wife of Tuan Thanh Phan, a Vietnam-born resident of Washington state who was on a deportation plane destined for South Sudan
Peruvian officials told US diplomats in a meeting on January 28 that taking non-citizens was a “sensitive” issue for their government, a State Department cable that month said. They noted that nearly 2 million Venezuelans were already in Peru and that many Peruvians blamed rising crime on migrants.
Peru’s Foreign Minister, Elmer Schialer, reiterated this message on June 16 in a meeting in which a US diplomat again asked Peru to take non-citizens, according to a new cable. But Schialer said his country would consider the option since it was important for “friends to help friends”.
Flights to Asia, Africa and Europe
The Trump administration has also turned to nations further afield to take in immigrants.
US diplomats even approached Ukraine, which has been fighting off a full-scale Russian invasion since 2022. A Ukrainian official told an American counterpart that the government would consider Washington’s request, a cable said.
Ukrainian leaders are trying to work with Trump to negotiate a deal to end the war.
Moldova, which borders Ukraine, is “willing to conditionally accept” 100 deportees from other nations, according to a memo by the US Department of Homeland Security in late March.
US diplomats have approached repressive Cambodia, in South-East Asia, and they also consider Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, a potential candidate. In May, Uzbekistan chartered a flight from New York to its capital, Tashkent, that transported 92 Uzbeks as well as 19 people originally from Kazakhstan and 20 from the Kyrgyz Republic, a State Department cable said.
Uzbekistan told the United States, however, that it did not want to become a regional hub for non-Uzbek deportees, the cable said.
Likewise, a Georgian diplomat did not offer a “substantive response” on a proposal to accept non-citizens but expressed “continued openness to co-operation”, another cable said.
And in March, American diplomats began pressing officials in Kosovo. They held six meetings over three months, then set a deadline of May 8 for an answer.
Kosovar officials said on May 12 that they would take up to 50 people but told the Americans they had “not come easily” to the decision, given government difficulties and the “potential political fallout”, a US cable said. The officials said they preferred women and children.
And they suggested Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, needed something in return. The officials said they wanted the United States to continue to lobby other nations to recognise Kosovo as a sovereign state, according to a diplomatic note obtained by the Times.
Similar conversations have taken place across Africa as well.
In late March, a US diplomat met government officials in the tiny kingdom of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, to push it to take expelled citizens of other nations, the DHS memo said.
But since October, the country has been dealing with an influx of 1100 refugees and asylum-seekers from Mozambique, a US State Department cable said. That raises questions about whether Eswatini has the resources to take people from the United States. And a recent State Department human rights report listed many abuses in the country, including extrajudicial killings and torture.
The day after the March meeting in Eswatini, officials from the Homeland Security and State Departments reported they were nearing a deal with Angola, according to the Homeland Security memo.
The State Department cable dated March 12 lists Angola as one of nine target nations across Africa and Asia. The others were Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Rwanda, Togo, Mauritania, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. The cable said these were potential “safe” nations where people could apply for asylum, even though Libya is racked by civil conflict and authoritarian Turkmenistan has an abysmal human rights record, according to State Department reports.
Rwanda appears eager. After the Trump administration paid the country $US100,000 in April to accept an Iraqi citizen, the Rwandan government agreed to take 10 more deportees, a US cable said. The episode with the Iraqi man “proved the concept for a new removal program”, the cable said. But the Trump administration is trying to negotiate a better deal, according to a US official familiar with the matter.
By contrast, a cable this month said Burkina Faso could not take non-citizens. US diplomats had also asked both Ethiopia and São Tomé and Príncipe, a tiny African island nation, to take non-citizens, two other cables said.
Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, a refugee resettlement agency, said the hundreds of expulsions so far from the United States were “another nail in the coffin of America’s role as a defender of human rights”.
“Imagine getting deported to a country where you have no family ties, where you don’t know the language or the culture, to which you have never even been, and with an atrocious human rights record,” Hetfield said. “Imagine that this happens when you may not be able to access a lawyer to represent you prior to being deported to such a place. This is what the Trump administration is pursuing.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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