A journey to nowhere
She was on a plane in shackles. Nobody would say where it was going. The Iranian woman was one of eighteen migrants held by United States immigration officials, all of them asking the same question. The guards, according to detainees, only taunted them in response. She was far from Iran. She was far from America. The flight was long. For hours, the only view was the seat in front, a locked cabin door, and the vast, empty sky outside a small window. It was an expulsion into the unknown, a journey without a map.
The map appeared eventually. It came on the seat-back video screens. It was only then that the detainees finally understood their destination. The aircraft was descending not towards the Middle East, nor anywhere in Asia, but towards the middle of Africa. It was a country whose name she did not recognise. A place she did not know existed. This was the brutal reality of a 'third country' deportation, where a person is removed not to their country of origin but to another nation entirely, one with which they have no connection. She was left stranded.
Her experience was not an isolated incident. Thousands of people were deported from the US in this way. A months long investigation by 72 journalists from 26 media organisations, named the Deportation Project, has exposed how the Trump administration built a secret pipeline to move unwanted people across the world. The reporting reveals a deliberate 'show of force' which saw people banished to lands completely alien to them through a series of shadowy deals.
The programme relied on agreements made quietly with dozens of countries. Washington secured arrangements for these nations, many of them in Africa, to accept individuals deported by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These were people the US wanted to expel but whose home countries would not, or could not, take them back. The policy was expensive. It cost American taxpayers millions of dollars. It also left a trail of broken lives across a continent.
The anatomy of a secret deal
The agreements themselves remain shrouded. They were not treaties debated in public. They were quiet arrangements. The specific terms of these deals have not been published, but the architecture of American foreign policy provides a clear map of the likely mechanisms used to secure them. Washington possesses immense leverage over many nations, particularly those in the developing world, and the Trump administration appears to have used this power to its fullest extent. This was not a negotiation between equals.
The primary tool was likely financial. Many African states depend heavily on American foreign aid, which supports everything from public health initiatives to military hardware, creating a powerful dynamic of obligation. A phone call from the State Department hinting that a multi million pound aid package might be reviewed or delayed could provide a powerful incentive for a foreign government to become more cooperative on a difficult issue like immigration. The pressure would not need to be explicit. It could be a suggestion. It was a potent threat.
Beyond direct aid, the United States could also use trade policy as a lever. Preferential trade terms, or access to the vast American market for key exports, are economic lifelines that Washington can constrict at will. Security cooperation offered another avenue for persuasion. For governments battling insurgencies or seeking to modernise their armed forces, the promise of American intelligence, training or equipment is an almost irresistible prize. The deal becomes simple. You take our deportees. We help you fight your wars.
Where inducements failed, penalties were available. A powerful, and often personal, tool is the use of visa sanctions. The threat to revoke or deny US visas for senior officials and their families, barring them from travel for education, business or pleasure, can apply direct pressure on the very individuals whose signatures are needed to finalise an agreement. The combination of these financial, security and diplomatic pressures created a coercive environment. It allowed Washington to secure deals that might otherwise have been politically impossible for African governments to accept. It was a show of force. The deals were done.
America's choice of Africa
The choice of Africa was not random. It was a cold calculation. Washington selected the continent as the primary destination for its third country deportation programme because it identified a unique combination of economic vulnerability, pliable legal systems and a low risk of political blowback. These factors made certain African nations the path of least resistance for a policy that would have been impossible to implement with more powerful global partners. The continent became a laboratory. It was a deliberate strategy.
Economic dependency was central to the American assessment. While the United States could apply financial pressure globally, the structural reliance of many African states on its aid created a profound power imbalance. The threat of withholding funds was not just a diplomatic inconvenience, it was an existential risk to national budgets, public health programmes and security operations that had been built around decades of American support. This made governments there exceptionally susceptible to requests from Washington, even for controversial policies that offered them no domestic benefit. Power was unequal. The administration knew it could secure compliance here in a way it could not with states in Europe or Asia, which possess more diversified economies and a lesser reliance on direct American funding.
Alongside this economic leverage, the Whiteusch administration correctly judged that the political and media fallout would be manageable. A deportation deal with a major European country would have provoked an immediate diplomatic firestorm and intense, sustained scrutiny from international news organisations. It would have been a headline story for weeks. By contrast, Washington believed that deals struck with smaller African nations could be kept quiet, away from the glare of the world’s media and the attention of its own domestic electorate. The legal hurdles were also perceived to be lower. Some states were seen as having less robust judicial oversight and fewer independent human rights organisations able to mount effective challenges to the arrival of deportees with no connection to the country. They expected little resistance. The policy could operate in the shadows.
These elements combined to create what the Trump administration saw as ideal conditions. The strategy was built on a cynical reading of international power dynamics, exploiting the financial needs and weaker institutional frameworks of its chosen partners. It allowed a contentious immigration policy to be outsourced to countries with little power to refuse and even less capacity to publicise their predicament. It was a hidden pipeline. The deportations began.
A policy of 'broken lives'
The consequences for those deported were devastating. They were a human price. For individuals caught in this system, the process began with shackles and humiliation on a long haul flight. Eighteen migrants on a single plane found out they were being sent to Africa only when a map appeared on their seat-back video screens, a sterile, digital confirmation of their fate. According to accounts from detainees, the American immigration officers escorting them refused to say where they were going, even taunting them for asking. This was the start of a journey to an alien land. An Iranian woman arrived in a country she had never heard of. She is one of thousands who were banished, their lives thrown into chaos by a secret deal. They were utterly alone.
This policy was also expensive. The 'show of force' that dispatched these planes cost American taxpayers millions. That figure accounts for the complex logistics of chartering aircraft, paying for security details, and managing the shadowy diplomatic arrangements that made the flights possible. The legal costs are harder to quantify but may prove even greater in the long term. Sending people, some of whom may have been asylum seekers, to so called 'third countries' with which they have no ties raises profound questions about America's commitment to international law. The system is designed for deportation to a person's country of origin, not to a nation chosen for its diplomatic convenience. This created a legally dubious pipeline. It left people without rights.
The investigation by seventy two journalists from twenty six media organisations revealed a policy of broken lives. This was the dark side of Donald Trump's immigration agenda, a system that prioritised expulsion above all else. People were left stranded in nations where they had no family, no money, and no understanding of the language or culture, effectively erased by a bureaucratic programme operating thousands of miles away. Their arrival was often as bewildering for local officials as it was for the deportees themselves. The secrecy was essential to the operation's success, because public knowledge would have invited legal challenges and political opposition. It was not poor policy. It was a deliberate strategy. The human misery was a calculated part of the price of removal.
An extension of Trump's doctrine
These deportations were not a rogue operation. They were the logical, if clandestine, extension of an immigration doctrine that consistently prioritised deterrence and removal over legal process or humanitarian considerations. The strategy was made concrete in steel barriers and sprawling border camps. This was a consistent philosophy pursued throughout Donald Trump’s presidency. The methods changed. The goal did not. The African deportation pipeline was simply another tool, one developed in secret when public facing policies faced legal and political limits. It was a new front in an old war. The administration sought to externalise its domestic immigration challenges, shifting the burden and the consequences onto other, often weaker, nations.
The ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, formally the Migrant Protection Protocols, offers the clearest parallel. It was a brutal innovation. Under its rules, tens of thousands of asylum seekers were pushed back across the southern border to wait, often in dangerous conditions, for their US court dates. America outsourced its problem. The African deportation pipeline applied the same principle, just on a global and far more secretive scale, replacing a neighbouring state with a coalition of distant nations. The geography was different. The logic was identical. Use a third country. Keep them out. Both policies treated asylum seekers not as people with rights under international law but as a logistical issue to be managed and, ultimately, deflected.
The project to build a wall on the border with Mexico was the most visible symbol of this approach. It was a statement in concrete and steel. Its purpose was simple. Stop people from getting in. The deportation pipeline to Africa acted as a complementary system, one designed not for prevention at the border but for removal from within the country’s interior. It ensured that even those who slipped through the net could be cast out again. Both were expressions of the same impulse. Both relied on a transactional view of foreign policy, where diplomatic relationships and aid were seen as leverage to achieve domestic immigration goals. This was true whether it meant securing Mexican cooperation or coercing an African state into accepting deportees. Nothing was off the table.
Seen together, these policies form a coherent whole. They were not isolated acts. They were components of a single machine designed to reduce the number of foreign nationals on American soil by any means available, transforming immigration from a legal process into a geopolitical contest. The wall stopped them coming. ‘Remain in Mexico’ held them back. The secret flights removed those who remained. From the Rio Grande to the airports of unnamed African capitals, the message from Donald Trump's administration was relentlessly consistent. You are not welcome here. The deals with African nations were the final, hidden piece of that architecture.
The fallout from the project
The project’s formal architecture may now be dormant. Its consequences are not. The revelation of these secret deals threatens to poison American diplomatic efforts in Africa for years, creating a deep well of distrust that will be difficult to empty. Goodwill has been damaged. Washington will find that its relationships on the continent have been fundamentally altered by a policy that treated sovereign nations as little more than instruments of its domestic agenda. Future diplomatic initiatives, however well intentioned, may be met with suspicion by African states who now know the price of American partnership can include complicity in a 'show of force' against vulnerable people. The deals were transactional. Their legacy will be too.
Legal challenges in the United States seem inevitable. They have a strong foundation. The investigation by seventy two journalists provides a roadmap for civil rights lawyers acting for the thousands of people affected by this policy. Cases will likely argue that deporting individuals to unfamiliar third countries, where they have no ties and potentially no legal status, constitutes a grave violation of their rights under American and international law. It was a policy of broken lives. The courts will be asked to provide a remedy. This litigation would force a public accounting, dragging the specifics of these shadowy agreements and the officials who brokered them out from the administrative darkness and into the open courtroom. That process would be costly and embarrassing.
Beyond the courtroom, the most significant fallout is the precedent. A blueprint now exists. It demonstrates how a powerful nation can use its economic and political leverage to create a global deportation network, bypassing its own legal and ethical constraints by outsourcing them. The model is dangerously transferable. A future American government could revive the programme with minimal effort, and other countries are undoubtedly watching. The concept of using third countries to manage migration is not new, but the Trump administration’s systematic and clandestine application on a transcontinental scale creates a new and disturbing template. The flights may have stopped. The idea, however, is now in circulation. Its most lasting impact may be its own replication.
Sources. Guardian UK: Banished to alien lands: Trump’s secret deportation deals. France 24: ICE, Trump and Africa: Secret deals, broken lives.
Analysis. Drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above and reviewed by an editor before publication. Jnews links to the organisations it writes about.
