Banished: the secret Trump deals sending migrants across the world

Today in Focus

This episode investigates the Trump administration's secret deportation policy of sending migrants to 'third countries' where they have no prior

Key takeaways

• The Trump administration has entered into approximately 35 secret deals with various countries to accept deportees.
• An estimated 2/3 of the 25,000 people sent to third countries have been moved to locations like Ghana and the Central African Republic.

Main topics

• Trump administration deportation deals
• Third-country migration patterns

Notable quotes

They were just being dumped. And then they're off the Trump administration's hands.

Conclusion

The investigation exposes a high-cost, secretive global strategy that

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This is The Guardian. Speaker 6 (0:09) Today, the immigrants sent by the Trump administration to random countries across the world. Speaker 7 (0:23) I've been reporting every year, see the immigration in Baltimore. This is Rabiatu Speaker 6 (0:32) Kuwate, a nurse from Sierra Leone. She had been living in the United States for over three decades after she said she was forced to flee from political persecution in her home country. Speaker 7 (0:45) Earlier Speaker 6 (0:46) this year, she went with her son Mohammed to one of her regular check-ins with immigration services. Speaker 3 (0:52) We left here that morning. She went and checked in. We just, you know, wait in the room. Speaker 6 (0:57) I'm sure you know where this is going. In the era of Trump 2.0, we've grown used to these kind of stories. Speaker 3 (1:19) Stories Speaker 6 (1:20) of families turning up to routine immigration appointments and for their lives suddenly changing in a heartbeat. Speaker 3 (1:28) Rabiatu, she said, yes, we're detaining you. You have an order of removal. They closed the door and that's all I had said. And I just was like, what? Speaker 7 (1:37) They said they're going to detain me that day. So I questioned why. So I had to call my son. My son asked them, why is my mom not going to go home with me? Then they said, your mom had an order of removal. And then we're going to put her in custody. Speaker 7 (1:56) What Speaker 6 (1:57) happens next to Rabiatu is also predictable. Like tens of thousands of other immigrants in the United States, she's immediately taken to his detention centre in Louisiana. But after this, things take an even darker turn. Speaker 6 (2:15) Because after a few months, Rabiatou is very suddenly taken from detention and driven to an airport. And then, handcuffed and shackled, she's put on a plane. Speaker 7 (2:26) They led me through the plane, so I had to manage, struggle to climb with the shackles in my feet and my hands. I was handcuffed and then they would walk me to a seat and then I went to the seat. I was there for like hours, I couldn't talk, I was numb. Even as the Speaker 6 (2:42) plane begins to taxi down the runway, Rabiatu had no idea what was happening or where she was being taken. Speaker 7 (2:50) That's when they break the news to me now they are taking me to Ghana. I said, what? Ghana. A country Rabiatu had never lived in. Speaker 6 (3:00) A country where she knew nobody. Speaker 7 (3:03) What am I going to do in Ghana? Everyone kept saying, I don't know, just cooperate with us. Speaker 6 (3:12) And even when she arrived in Ghana... This wasn't her final destination. While the policy of deporting immigrants to other third countries is far from new, remember when the UK government tried to send asylum seekers to Rwanda? It's never been used widely. Until now. Since 2025, the Trump administration has struck secret deals with governments around the world to accept people deported from the United States who have no connection to those countries. People from Peru and Colombia have ended up in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A Brazilian and a Cameroonian have been sent to Equatorial Guinea. And once dumped there, there is almost never a way back. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today on Focus, destination unknown. The human stories behind Trump's third country deportation policy. Speaker 6 (4:18) We've just heard Rabiata's really, really shocking story of how she was taken from her life in the US and sent against her will and in shackles to Ghana. Louisa Loveluck, you're an investigative journalist at The Guardian and you've been part of a consortium of journalists from different media organisations looking into how people like Rabiata are finding themselves. in this terrible situation. Rabiatou was actually interviewed by one of your partners at France 24. When you started this project, along with these other media organisations, on Trump's deportations, what were the questions that you were trying to get answers Speaker 4 (4:57) to? Well, when you look at the deportation project of the Trump administration, what you see is that a lot of it isn't at all secret. You know, they're publicising it every day. I have a secret message today for every gang member and criminal alien. that are threatening so violently our people. And so there isn't much in the shadows. We will find you, we will arrest you, we will jail you, and we will deport you. But then we started to hear about these 25,000 people who'd been sent to third countries. Speaker 2 (5:31) It is now 20 countries have signed third country national agreements, meaning these are safe countries where individuals who refuse to go back to their country of origin can be sent to that country instead. Speaker 4 (5:41) We started to realize that there wasn't very much information about where people were going, who was going and what was in the deals. It was at that point that the Forbidden Stories organization, which led this project, decided that bringing together a lot of different media organizations from different countries with different types of access would... be the best way of addressing some of these questions. Speaker 6 (6:01) I was really shocked by you just said 25,000. I knew about these deportations to third countries that were being carried out, but I had no idea it was so many people. I mean, that is a lot of people. It must have actually been quite hard to track Speaker 4 (6:15) them down as well. It's very different types of people being sent to a lot of different places. You've got 20,000 people who've been put on buses and sent over the Mexican border into Mexico. There's 20,000 people who are not from Mexico. A lot of people don't have ties. But then you have this other 5,000 people who had been put on planes to other countries around the world. And at that point, it starts to get very difficult. And so piecing together kind of where everyone ended up bit by bit was... incredibly painstaking and took a really big team. Speaker 6 (6:46) What's the point of sending asylum seekers like Rabiatu to third countries instead Speaker 4 (6:53) of just sending them home? Under American law, you're not allowed to send people back to places where they may face persecution, they may more likely than not face torture, imprisonment or death. And so the logic here has been to create a loophole. They create the situation where a third country will take them, as we say, it's somewhere that they often don't have connections to. But the logic that the administration puts forward is like, that's okay, because it's not the place where they face persecution, torture, death. That said, what is often the case, and what seems to be part of these deals in a kind of like, with a nudge and a wink, is that they are then sent home. Speaker 4 (7:31) But it is not the United States sending them home. And indeed, when the Foreign Senate Relations Committee did monitor some of these deals earlier in the policy from 2025 onwards, they found that there wasn't any meaningful follow up. You know, it wasn't being watched what happened next. They were just being dumped. And then they're off the Trump administration's hands. Speaker 6 (7:50) Yeah, and I've read parts of that report. And there