Trump's Secret $410 Million Plan To Deport People To Countries They've Never Been To

Rabbiatu Kuyateh went in for a routine Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in in Baltimore in early July 2025 and did not walk back out. She had fled Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s, built a life as a nurse in the United States on a long string of renewable work permits, and raised her family there for more than three decades. Of the country where she had spent most of her adult life she said simply, “I’ve known it as my home.” After four months in detention she learned the government intended to put her on a plane to Ghana, more than a thousand kilometers from the place she was born and a country she had never set foot in.

She was not alone on that flight. A man the reporting identified only as Malick, born in Senegal and arrived in the United States in 2023, was removed on the same aircraft. Their cases sat inside a much larger machinery. Since January 2025 the Trump administration has concluded bilateral agreements with 35 countries allowing the United States to deport people who are not citizens of those countries and often have no ties to them at all. By August 31, 2026, at least 25,447 people had been sent to places that were not their own. Roughly 20,000 went overland to Mexico. At least 5,447 others were flown to 27 additional countries. The people on those flights represented 89 different nationalities.

The money attached to the program is what turned the practice into a standing system. Internal State Department records obtained by journalists show that the Office of Remigration, a division created inside the department in 2025, planned to spend at least $410 million in payments to governments and humanitarian organizations to make the agreements work. Of that total, $81 million was earmarked for signatory governments through fast-tracked contracts. Another $178 million was set aside for the United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration and $123 million for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

Christian Jové Ehrhardt, a 41-year-old diplomat who previously worked security operations at U.S. embassies, including a posting in Yaoundé, heads the office. In November 2025 he returned to Cameroon as its chief negotiator. A U.S. official familiar with his role told The Washington Post that foreign hosts are encouraged to treat him as more than a mid-level diplomat: “The messaging is not just that he is a deputy assistant secretary of state. He’s really part of the White House, so they roll out the red carpet.” On that trip he met Foreign Minister Felix Mbayu. Embassy posts described talks on security, health, and humanitarian assistance, public roundtables with UNHCR, and a hospital tour meant to show the effects of American funding. The unannounced purpose was a third-country removal deal.

The memorandum of understanding with Cameroon was finalized on December 16, 2025. The same day the United States approved a five-year health assistance package for the country worth nearly $400 million. In January the State Department announced an additional $30 million contribution to UNHCR in Cameroon “to facilitate the voluntary return of refugees and combat illegal immigration.” Two days after that announcement, on January 14, the first deportation flight from the United States landed in Cameroon. The MOU itself was uploaded quietly to the State Department website months later.

The pattern repeated elsewhere with different price tags and different caps. Palau, a Pacific island nation of fewer than 18,000 people, signed in December 2025 to accept up to 75 third-country nationals for $7.5 million; only three people have been sent so far. Eswatini agreed to take as many as 160 under a deal worth more than $5 million; 32 have arrived since July 2025, including people with criminal records. Thirteen African nations have signed, among them governments the United States had not previously treated as deportation partners. Savi Arvey, director of policy for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First, said the administration’s approach had grown steadily less transparent. “Over the past year, the government had been very opaque about these third country transfers,” she said. “These [flights] were being carried out in secret.” Her organization and Refugees International built an open-source tracker from flight data and local sources because official tallies were not published.

On September 18 a federal appeals court halted the removals, finding that people had not been given enough advance notice to contest being sent to a third country and that the practice violated due process. The suit had been brought by the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, and Human Rights First on behalf of a nationwide class. Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, called the decision “a major victory” and said, “The third country deportations that have occurred were illegal.” James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote on X that the ruling was “not currently in effect” and added, “If you claim fear in your home country, DHS has the right to send you elsewhere.”

The Office of Remigration kept negotiating while the legal fight moved. Ehrhardt’s Cameroon trip was one of roughly ten he made in a year. Each agreement layered diplomatic language about health and humanitarian cooperation over the core transaction: a receiving government would take people who had never lived there, often in exchange for cash, contracts, or side packages of assistance whose full terms remained unpublished.