DEPORTATIONSExile by Agreement: Guyana and U.S. Expansion of Third-Country Deportations
On September 5, Guyana received six people expelled from the United States who were not Guyanese. There are many questions yet to be answered about the Guyana case, and the answers to these questions will determine whether Guyana’s arrangement is a temporary humanitarian placement with real legal protections, or a new outpost in an expanding system of globalized deportation.
On September 5, Guyana received six people expelled from the United States who were not Guyanese: four Cubans and two Afghans, according to Guyanese reporting. Guyana’s government says the arrivals were vetted, had no criminal backgrounds, and entered under a one-year arrangement administered with the International Organization for Migration. Officially, their placement is temporary. They will remain in Guyana while their immigration status is determined; afterward, they may return to their countries of nationality or depart for another country. The Guyanese government says Washington will cover the costs and that the arrangement does not amount to permanent resettlement.
These assurances distinguish Guyana’s program in tone from some of the more coercive U.S. removals elsewhere. But they do not resolve the underlying question raised by the new deal: What, precisely, happens when a government deports someone not to their home country but to a country in which they are, in every practical sense, a stranger?
For the Trump administration, third-country removals have become a central instrument of its mass-deportation agenda. The policy is meant to solve—or circumvent—a familiar problem in immigration enforcement: some governments will not issue travel documents or accept the return of their own nationals, while others may be unsafe destinations for people who have a justified fear of persecution or torture. Rather than leave people in the United States under supervision, as previous administrations often did, the Trump administration has sought countries willing to receive them instead.
The result is an expanding global architecture of deportation agreements—many secret, many apparently informal, and many resting on a considerable imbalance of power between the United States and poorer or politically vulnerable receiving states.
The policy’s logic is stark. A person may be Cuban, Afghan, Iranian, Venezuelan, Turkish, Russian, or Nicaraguan; have lived in the United States for years; have relatives, children, employment, or a pending legal claim there, and yet be flown to Guyana, Rwanda, Eswatini, the Central African Republic, Ghana, Panama, or Mexico. The receiving country may be one the person has never visited, whose language they do not speak, and whose asylum system or social-services capacity may be thin to nonexistent.
In this system, deportation no longer necessarily means return. It can mean banishment.
