Human Rights First has created a new website to track and explain third-country deportations from the United States.
Here is the new Third-country Deportations Watch website.
Here’s the cheat sheet (chart) with an overview of third country deportations from the US.
Countries with current or pending agreements include these:
Belize | Costa Rica | Ecuador | El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea | Eswatini | Ghana | Guatemala
Honduras | Kosovo | Liberia | Libya | Mexico
Panama | Paraguay | Poland | Rwanda
South Sudan | Uganda | Uzbekistan
Here are some notes from their launch zoom about the new website:
- 288 men went to El Salvador (CECOT prison) – no family or lawyer contact – tortured
- 299 people to Panama – no communication with lawyers/family.
- 200+ people (including 81 children as young as 2 years old) to Costa Rica that were held in a pencil factory with substandard housing, food, healthcare.
- Ghanaian human rights lawyers are working to uncover the agreement between the US and Ghana b/c judges are unable to rule on individual cases without seeing the agreement. Some people have been brought to the border and released so that Ghana (and the Ghanaian legal system) will not have to deal with them.
- Third-country deportation practices ignore “non-refoulement” provisions in U.S. asylum law/treaties – which agrees not to send asylum-seekers to countries that could harm them.
- Experts fear that the US and Europe will create more universal third-country deportation agreements that will become standard practice and will be impossible to roll back.
Immigration Insight 