More than a dozen UN human rights experts have urged the Trump administration to halt or fundamentally reconsider its policy of deporting migrants and asylum seekers to countries other than their countries of origin, warning that the practice could expose vulnerable people to torture, persecution and other serious abuses.
In a communication issued Monday, the experts said migrants transferred to countries with which they have no meaningful ties may face heightened risks of ill-treatment, arbitrary detention, discrimination, trafficking, enforced disappearance and violations of the principle of non-refoulement.
The principle of non-refoulement prohibits states from sending people to places where they face a serious risk of persecution, torture or other grave harm.
The experts said the consequences are particularly serious for people who had previously obtained protection from U.S. immigration authorities because returning them directly to their countries of origin could expose them to persecution or torture.
They warned that transferring such individuals to a third country must not become a mechanism for indirectly sending them back to the same danger from which they had been protected.
According to the UN experts, at least 23,000 third-country nationals have already been transferred under such arrangements to 29 countries and territories. They also said their concerns had been communicated to the governments of 35 countries and territories that had entered into arrangements with Washington to receive deported individuals.
The experts singled out several groups they said face particularly serious risks, including children, women, people with disabilities, victims of human trafficking, LGBT people, human rights defenders and stateless people.
“The harms caused by this US Government scheme are no longer hypothetical,” the experts said, warning of what they described as a cascade of human rights violations.
One of the cases drawing international attention involves Equatorial Guinea, where migrants transferred from the United States have faced concerns over detention and possible subsequent removal to countries where they could face persecution or torture.
The Trump administration has defended third-country deportations as part of its immigration enforcement strategy. U.S. officials have argued that the arrangements allow the government to remove people whom the United States cannot directly return to their countries of origin under existing legal restrictions.
The policy is also facing a major legal challenge inside the United States. A federal appeals court in Boston recently ruled that the administration’s expedited third-country deportation policy violated migrants’ due-process rights because they were not given sufficient notice or a meaningful opportunity to raise concerns about possible persecution or torture in the destination country.
The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and allow the policy to continue while the broader legal dispute proceeds.
The dispute therefore extends beyond the question of where migrants can be deported. At its core is the question of whether a government can transfer a person to a country where that person has no connection while still meeting its obligations to prevent indirect return to persecution or torture.
For Nimruz, the case highlights a broader tension between immigration enforcement and international refugee protections. As governments increasingly rely on third-country arrangements to manage deportations, the treatment of people after transfer — and the safeguards preventing their onward removal to places where they face serious harm — is likely to remain at the center of the legal and human rights debate.
