U.S. Could Vastly Expand Global Immigrant Detention Network

With tons of new money and the Supreme Court’s blessing, the United States is making a “global gulag.”

The Trump administration is set to vastly expand deportations to countries other than immigrants’ home nations, supercharging a system of international detainee transfers that human rights advocates say exposes thousands of people to human rights abuses, including potential persecution or torture in unsafe countries.

Such deportations, known as “third-country” removals, are emerging as an important piece of President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda. And several recent developments could fuel their dramatic expansion — including billions in new funding from Congress, aggressive pressure from U.S. diplomats on dozens of countries to accept third-country agreements, and the blessing of the Supreme Court, which late last month allowed the Trump administration to dramatically limit what human rights protections it applies to third-country deportees.

So far, the administration has sent hundreds of people to various nations other than their own, including El Salvador, where they’ve been indefinitely detained in the notorious CECOT prison, and South Sudan. On Tuesday, it added to the list, sending five men from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Cuba and Yemen to the African nation of Eswatini, which borders South Africa. Domestic and international legal efforts have sprung up to challenge the practice, with some success.

Now, though, the Trump administration is seeking to capitalize on its new resources and legal authority with an aggressive policy for third-country deportations, in which a detainee can be sent to a country totally foreign to them with no notice at all, nor any opportunity to object over fears of torture or persecution, The Washington Post reported Sunday. Reuters confirmed the report.

The policy “puts thousands of lives at risk of persecution and torture,” Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, one of the groups involved in the litigation over third-country removals, told the Post.