US expands third-country deportations despite judge protection orders

The Trump administration has expanded its use of “third-country deportations” by sending migrants to countries they are not from—an administrative workaround that shifts legal risk offshore while preserving domestic political optics.

The Independent reports, citing Associated Press reporting, the case of Farah, a 21-year-old gay woman from Morocco who sought asylum in the United States. Morocco criminalises same-sex relations, punishable by up to three years in prison. Farah says she fled after violent attacks by her family and her partner’s family, travelled overland from Brazil to the US border in early 2025, and spent nearly a year in detention.

An immigration judge denied her asylum but issued a protection order barring removal to Morocco on the grounds that it would endanger her life. Yet Farah says she was handcuffed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and put on a flight to Cameroon—another country where homosexuality is illegal—before ultimately being flown back to Morocco.

Lawyers cited by AP describe the practice as a legal “loophole”: if the US is prohibited from deporting someone to their home country, it can attempt removal to a third state that may then return the person, or simply keep them in limbo. In Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, attorney Joseph Awah Fru said a detention facility held 15 deportees from various African countries, none of them Cameroonian. He said all nine people on a January flight had US judge-issued protection orders.

This is outsourcing in the literal sense. The US state faces a domestic budget constraint (detention capacity, court backlogs, political pressure to reduce arrivals) and a credibility constraint (court orders and due process). Third-country removal relaxes both constraints: it reduces the immediate domestic cost and moves the hardest moral and legal questions into jurisdictions with weaker protections.

The incentive structure is straightforward. For an administration that wants fewer people to attempt asylum, the threat is not merely deportation; it is uncertainty. Officials have signalled that migrants could end up “in any number of third countries,” a deterrence strategy that relies on fear of arbitrary outcomes. But arbitrariness is also a governance choice: it makes the system less legible, harder to contest, and therefore cheaper to operate.

The predictable casualty is the rule-of-law principle that a state should be bound by its own adjudications. If a protection order can be circumvented by changing the destination label, the order becomes a suggestion—useful for courtroom theatre, optional in logistics.

Europeans should pay attention. Once a major Western state normalises third-country deportation as an administrative tool, it becomes a template: export the liability, keep the politics. Humanitarian commitments then survive mostly as press releases, while the real system optimises for cost-shifting and deterrent signalling.