It takes at least two countries for the expulsion to occur: one to send deportees and one to receive them. As a rule, the receiver country agrees to resume its own citizens, but the Trump administration is developing other options.
The United States has sent hundreds of deportees, most of whom seem to be Venezuelans, in Salvador, where it is detained in a notorious maximum security prison for its brutality. The United States has sent migrants from Asia, the Middle East and Africa to Panama and Costa Rica, including families with young children.
The Trump administration is also in the first interview with the Rwandan government to send deportees to the Central African country, and this month, the United States has planned to send Laotian, Vietnamese and Philippine migrants to Libya before retreating to a court order. (Representatives of Libya war governments have since denied having concluded an agreement to accept the deportees from the United States.)
The expansion of the expulsion program for the third country in the administration seems to have two objectives in the service of its primordial objective of withdrawing millions of immigrants from the United States, including undocumented immigrants and those who have legal status but are considered undesirable by the administration.
The first seems largely tactical: it creates a process to eliminate migrants whose countries of origin do not want them to come back. Venezuela, for example, only sporadically accepts expulsion flights from the United States.
The second objective, it seems, is strategic: to convince immigrants, documented or otherwise, that staying in the United States is so risky that they should “self-conform”, lest they end in a brutal prison. It is a campaign designed for deterrence.
Zoom out, there is another way to look at these deportations: by creating expulsion agreements from the third country and affirming that they are protected from legal examination or surveillance, the administration tries to create an outsourced global detention system where the rights to the regular procedure do not actually exist, one of the mainly authoritarian governments that try to obtain the favor of President Trump.
Trump and his allies described the deportation policies of the administration as necessary for national security. He questioned the right to a regular procedure, which is guaranteed in the American Constitution for citizens and non-citizens, if this hinders his mass expulsion campaign.
Severe treatment in third countries
Rwanda and Libya have spent years positioning itself as solutions to the immigration problems of richer nations.
In 2022, Rwanda agreed to take asylum seekers in Great Britain in exchange for hundreds of millions of pounds. Between 2014 and 2017, he accepted thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers from Israel. Libya has also obtained considerable aid and other European countries concessions in exchange to help migrants to reach European soil.
But these plans did not go well because there is a mountain of evidence showing that Rwanda and Libya are not safe destinations for asylum seekers or other migrants. US law prohibits expelling people to countries where they are likely to deal with persecution or torture.
The British plan of Rwanda collapsed after a court concluded that he had violated international humanitarian law, which prohibits the sending of refugees to countries where they are confronted with persecution. Rwanda has a record of persecution of political opponents to the country and abroad, and its courts had rejected all the asylum complaints of people fleeing conflict zones, noted the court.
The British court also found that refugees sent to Rwanda risked being expelled again in other countries where their security could not be insured either. The Israeli Supreme Court interrupted the deportations to Rwanda after having reached a similar conclusion in 2018.
The extreme abuses of migrants in Libya have also been well documented. In a 2021 report, Amnesty International described migrant detention centers in the country as “hellish landscape” where adult prisoners and children have been subject to sexual violence and other forms of abuse. And in February of this year, two joint pits containing at least 93 migrant organizations were found in Libya, which prompted calls to the European Union to freeze the funding for migration for the country’s security forces.
For Trump administration, the severe treatment of prisoners may be more a characteristic than a bug.
El Salvador boasted of flashy videos on humiliating and dehumanizing conditions in which he holds prisoners. Kristi Noem, the American secretary for internal security, who visited the massive terrorism Confinement Center, known as Cecot last month, made a similar point:
The legal abyss
Double state theory describes a type of authoritarianism in which a government maintains an apparently normal legal system while creating an area where people have no real rights and can be subject to violence and coercion without constraint. Aziz Huq, professor of law at the University of Chicago, described this as a “legal abyss”.
The worst suffering comes to those who fall into this abyss, but that affects all those who live under such a system. A government that can push people into the abyss is fundamentally without constraint. And the threat of being pushed into the abyss can make freedoms uncertain and conditional.
In most double states, the legal abyss is managed by the government itself, on its own territory. But El Salvador, himself a double state, seems to have offered his legal abyss in the United States on a contractual basis, imprisoning deportees to Cecot, a notorious prison where people are held in brutal conditions, cut off from all contacts with the outside world and with little liberation perspectives.
The Trump administration argued that the American courts have no competence on these deportations or the rights of deportees sent to Salvador.
The situation in Rwanda is less clear. If the American deportees were treated in a similar way to those of Israel and Great Britain, they would not be imprisoned or detained. But the Israeli and British decisions of the High Court show that there are reasons to believe that their rights could be raped in other ways and that they would have little access to a regular procedure if the government had imprisoned them at the request of the Trump administration.
And Libya seems particularly likely to become another subcontracted legal abyss if it becomes a destination for American deportees. Libya is a weak state and torn by the war, not a double, where a recognized government of the United Nations in Tripoli governs Libya in the West and another in Benghazi, led by the war lord Khalifa Haftar, controls the east.
For years, Libya has maintained a network of detention centers where migrants do not use a regular procedure, and there is no functional limit on the violence to which prisoners, including children, are submitted. Human rights groups have described the “horrible” and “deplorable” conditions, and they fear that if the United States send people there, detainees will have no rights and no means of escape.
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