He disappeared into a foreign prison

In late summer, Yoon found out Ice She transferred Jim to its staging facility in Alexandria, in central Louisiana, from where detainees are typically deported. I called Yoon Ice To find out where the agency was planning to send him. Ice She never responded to her emails. At that point, “more alarm bells started ringing,” Lee Yun told me.

Then, on the morning of September 8, Jim Pune called in a panic. “I’m in Ghana!” He shouted. Yoon rushed to gather information about Jim and the other detainees who were being held with him. Four days later, she and her colleagues filed an urgent lawsuit, drawing life-or-death fears for five of them. The next morning, I received a phone call from all eleven individuals detained at the Boundasi training camp, who asked me to describe their ordeal. “They didn’t tell us where we were going,” Jim said that morning. “They kidnapped us overnight and took us out.”

For months, I have been trying to document the Trump administration’s secret deportations to third countries. At first, accessing any information was difficult. Some of the deportees were held in remote prisons or detention centres; Others have gone into hiding. Friends and relatives in the United States often felt afraid to speak out, for fear of retaliation. “I don’t know that the article you are considering is necessarily writeable now,” the leading lawyer on the issue, Anwen Hughes, of the group Human Rights First, wrote to me in late July.

Initially, I focused on two groups of third-country deportees, known to human rights lawyers as the “South Sudanese Eight” and the “Eswatini Five.” The first group, from countries such as Myanmar, Mexico and Laos, were deported in early July, to South Sudan, a country struggling to recover from a civil war. Days later, a second group of five men from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen, all of whom had lived in the United States for many years, were deported to the southern African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. There, they were detained in a high-security prison, without clear justification.

The Trump administration appears to have carefully selected these deportees to test a new approach to mass deportation. According to the Department of Homeland Security, they were all convicted of serious crimes, including murder. While announcing the trip to Eswatini, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, described the five deportees as “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,” a claim denied by at least one country. Arguably the most surprising part of these early takedowns was also the least understood. The matter was not limited to sending these men to countries where they had no relations, and to unsafe places. It was the case that in many cases, men who had completed their sentence in the United States years ago were now being held indefinitely abroad.

The broader strategy of forced transfer to a third country had clear political roots. On January 20, the first day of Donald Trump’s second term, Trump issued an executive order titled “Secure Our Borders,” which announced, among other things, the intention to expand the use of third-country deportations. On February 18, the Department of Homeland Security issued an internal memorandum of guidance, ordering immigration officials to “review and deport” all cases “on the non-detainer list” — that is, anyone with an immigration case who was not on the list. Ice Bail. As part of this review, DHS officials “determine the feasibility of removal to a third country” — and if they find that removal to a third country is feasible, they attempt to detain the person. The first large-scale deportations to a third country occurred that month and targeted newly arrived asylum seekers. Between February 12 and 15, the United States sent two hundred and ninety-nine people – from countries such as Afghanistan, Cameroon, Somalia, and Iran – to Panama. On February 20 and 25, the United States sent an additional two hundred people, including eighty-one children, to Costa Rica. Shortly thereafter came third-country deportation flights to Uzbekistan and El Salvador, where more than two hundred and fifty non-Salvadoran immigrants were detained in the brutal Terrorist Detention Center, also known by its Spanish acronym. Sekot. Some men were detained Sekot They were taken there as part of another third-country removal experiment: the president declared that the United States had been “invaded” by the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua cartel, allowing the supposed gang members to be removed. (In June, U.S. District Judge James Bosberg found that the government violated these men’s rights by not giving them the opportunity to appeal their deportation.)