Trump Administration Pays $410 Million for Third-Country Deportations

Rabbiatu Kuyateh went in for a routine Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in in Baltimore in early July 2025 and did not walk back out. She had fled Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s, built a life as a nurse in the United States on a long string of renewable work permits, and raised her family there for more than three decades. Of the country where she had spent most of her adult life she said simply, “I’ve known it as my home.” After four months in detention she learned the government intended to put her on a plane to Ghana, more than a thousand kilometers from the place she was born and a country she had never set foot in.

She was not alone on that flight. A man the reporting identified only as Malick, born in Senegal and arrived in the United States in 2023, was removed on the same aircraft. Their cases sat inside a much larger machinery. Since January 2025 the Trump administration has concluded bilateral agreements with 35 countries allowing the United States to deport people who are not citizens of those countries and often have no ties to them at all. By August 31, 2026, at least 25,447 people had been sent to places that were not their own. Roughly 20,000 went overland to Mexico. At least 5,447 others were flown to 27 additional countries. The people on those flights represented 89 different nationalities.

The money attached to the program is what turned the practice into a standing system. Internal State Department records obtained by journalists show that the Office of Remigration, a division created inside the department in 2025, planned to spend at least $410 million in payments to governments and humanitarian organizations to make the agreements work. Of that total, $81 million was earmarked for signatory governments through fast-tracked contracts. Another $178 million was set aside for the United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration and $123 million for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

Christian Jové Ehrhardt, a 41-year-old diplomat who previously worked security operations at U.S. embassies, including a posting in Yaoundé, heads the office. In November 2025 he returned to Cameroon as its chief negotiator. A U.S. official familiar with his role told The Washington Post that foreign hosts are encouraged to treat him as more than a mid-level diplomat: “The messaging is not just that he is a deputy assistant secretary of state. He’s really part of the White House, so they roll out the red carpet.” On that trip he met Foreign Minister Felix Mbayu. Embassy posts described talks on security, health, and humanitarian assistance, public roundtables with UNHCR, and a hospital tour meant to show the effects of American funding. The unannounced purpose was a third-country removal deal.