UN experts warn US third-country deportations trigger human rights violations

Twenty-four experts urge immediate halt to policy sending migrants to 35 nations

Twenty-four independent experts who advise the UN Human Rights Council issued the warning on Monday, joined by a special rapporteur for the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. In a joint statement, they said they had contacted the United States and each of the 35 nations that have agreed to accept US deportees and called for an immediate halt to the practice.

“The harms caused by this US government scheme are no longer hypothetical,” the experts said. “The arrangements are triggering a cascade of human rights violations. For migrants in situations of particular vulnerability, the consequences can be deadly.”

Since Donald Trump returned to power in 2025, the US government has been offering millions of dollars to foreign governments to take in migrants — including refugees and asylum seekers — who have no ties to those countries. Of the 35 nations that have struck deals, nearly a third are in Africa; others are in Latin America, the Caribbean and central Asia.

About 20,000 people have been taken by bus to Mexico, according to Refugees International and Human Rights First, and more than 5,000 others have been put on flights to countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and central Asia. An investigation by the Guardian, as part of a consortium of journalists coordinated by the Forbidden Stories network, uncovered the ordeals of some who have been deported.

Human rights lawyers say the deportations allow the US administration to skirt around its legal obligations, because US law does not allow people to be sent back to countries where they are likely to be persecuted. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security has been deporting migrants, including asylum seekers, to third countries, from where they are often moved onward to home countries they had fled.

“These migrants are being transferred to countries or territories with which they have no ties, which can be a traumatising and isolating experience that compounds harms already suffered which triggered their fleeing to the US in the first place,” the joint statement said. “Others are sent to places where they risk further violence or discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or human rights advocacy.”

Monday’s statement pointed to the severe impact on people who were already vulnerable: “What is at stake is not merely migration policy, but the lives, safety, dignity and rights of people who may already have endured grave harm and who, in many cases, are fleeing life-threatening persecution and violence in their home countries.”

The experts warned that deportees could also face trafficking and slavery in countries where they have no connections. Those being banished to countries where they had no connections faced an increased risk of torture and ill-treatment, as well as enforced disappearances, they noted. Several of the receiving nations are themselves engulfed in conflict, displacement, starvation and debilitating poverty, the statement noted. Those countries, it said, “lack the capacity to protect the rights of migrants sent there by wealthy nations seeking to shirk their international obligations.”

The Guardian’s investigation included the account of an Iranian woman who had sought safety in the US after protesting against the Iranian government, and a gay man who had fled Ghana after he was outed and then hunted by members of his own family. The Trump administration maintains that its deportations are focused on removing criminals from the United States.

Beatrice Njeri, the Global Strategic Litigation Council’s regional litigator for Africa, called the joint statement the first comprehensive one of its kind. She cited two men expelled to Equatorial Guinea who had been bound, fitted with bags over their heads, beaten and pushed down a flight of stairs.

“It comes at a very important point in time when we are continuing to see extreme human rights violations that are super horrific,” Njeri said. African states involved in the scheme have paid little attention to pleas, litigation and advocacy aimed at halting the arrangements, she added. “So, it has felt like we’re screaming into a void. And we hope that this statement will contribute to trying to hold these states accountable.”

Njeri also warned that some EU countries are ramping up their own calls for offshore centers for migrants. “This is a good warning to them not to follow suit,” she said. “European states now clearly know how African states are implementing the agreements, violating people’s rights and offering no redress. And so they have no excuse.”

Liberia has agreed to accept 1,200 people deported under the program, according to the Guardian.