US quietly deports asylum seekers to Cameroon

The US has begun quietly moving asylum seekers to Cameroon, turning what is nominally a rights-based protection system into something closer to logistics: once a person is physically removed from US jurisdiction, key procedural safeguards—lawyers, hearings, and public scrutiny—become harder to access or simply vanish.

TIME reports that these transfers are carried out with minimal transparency, framed as deportations to a “third country” rather than to an applicant’s country of origin. In practice, the point is not geography; it is jurisdiction. The state does not need to win an argument in court if it can move the person to where the argument cannot be heard.

This is less an immigration policy than an administrative hack. The legal architecture of asylum assumes the applicant is present, reachable, and able to communicate with counsel and the courts. Third-country transfers exploit the opposite: distance, language barriers, and the friction of dealing with foreign authorities. It is a classic bureaucratic move—solve a politically sensitive problem by shifting it across an institutional boundary, then claim the boundary makes the problem someone else’s.

The result is a kind of “rights arbitrage.” The US can claim it is enforcing immigration law while avoiding the messier, more visible part: individualized adjudication under public oversight. Once transported, the person’s access to representation and evidence collection becomes fragile. Family and advocates struggle to locate them. Paper trails thin out. And because the transfer is framed as routine enforcement, the accountability mechanisms that might trigger in a high-profile deportation case often do not.

The policy also creates perverse incentives inside government. Agencies are rewarded for throughput—removals completed—rather than for accuracy or fairness. When success is measured in flight manifests, the system naturally evolves toward whatever produces fewer delays, fewer hearings, and fewer lawyers.

The point is not confined to immigration. A state that can reclassify people as cargo and move them through a supply chain can apply the same logic elsewhere: administrative detention, asset forfeiture, surveillance orders—anything where the core trick is to make contesting power expensive, slow, or practically impossible.

TIME’s reporting suggests third-country removals are not a rare emergency measure but a scalable model. That should worry anyone who still believes rights are something you possess, rather than something the state rents to you—until you are loaded onto the next plane.