1790-1876
1877-1929
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1991-Now

1991-Now

Deportation Nation

Who gets to enter the United States?

Afrikaner refugees from South Africa arrive, Monday, May 12, 2025, at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va. | Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP

Since 1991, more than 31 million immigrants have received lawful permanent resident status in the United States. This number does not reflect the millions of people who have come to the United States outside legal channels and remain without status. Currently, there are an estimated 12 million undocumented people living in the U.S. today, most of whom have lived here for more than a decade. Nor do these numbers reflect the migrants prevented from arriving in the United States by the expansion of border controls beyond the physical boundaries of the United States. Although the 1951 Refugee Convention, its 1967 Protocol, and the Refugee Act of 1980 entitle people to apply for asylum if they reach the United States, the Supreme Court reads those laws not to extend protection to people stopped abroad, even if by the U.S. government. Since 1924, when Congress first required immigrants to acquire entry visas from consular authorities abroad, U.S. authorities have pressured foreign governments to impose travel controls that stop immigrants from arriving at U.S. borders and ports of entry without prior authorization from the United States government. Beginning in the 1990s, the U.S. started to directly finance and support efforts in Mexico to dissuade Mexican and Central American migrants from making the journey north, and to stop those who tried before they could reach the border. More recently, authorities have leveraged and created other programs to deny people the chance to seek asylum, such as the Title 42 public health order, which the government used to summarily expel people who sought to apply for asylum; and the CBP One smartphone app program, which bars people from applying for asylum until the app assigns them a date and time at which they can come to a port of entry. Federal authorities have not uniformly enforced these programs. For example, Ukrainians were exempted from expulsion under Title 42 within weeks of Russia’s invasion, even as over 26,000 Haitians were expelled at about the same time. Most recently, a mix of Executive Orders and policy changes appear to have closed off virtually all access to asylum at the southern border. These rules continue to evolve. In practice, decisions on who gets to enter are often made far from the territorial borders, with little if any legal scrutiny. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has encouraged South African Afrikaners to seek asylum in the United States.

The Rise of Mass Deportation

Image of Haitian migrants in Del Rio | Paul Ratje / Getty Images

During the 1990s, Congress and the Executive Branch worked together to increase the number of deportations and other forced removals from the United States. They did this by tightly linking immigration control to the criminal legal system. The law most responsible for that shift was the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). It created the legal infrastructure for federal immigration authorities to deputize local police officers as front-line immigration agents, established vast new authority for the immigrant detention system, and dramatically expanded the kinds of crimes that trigger deportation. During this period, although the majority of migrants removed from the United States continued to be apprehended while attempting to enter the United States without inspection, federal authorities dramatically increased the number of long-term residents deported from the country.

The mass deportation machine created in the 1990s expanded after 9/11. In particular, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 linked immigration control to the “War on Terror,” giving rise to a new era of targeting Muslim migrants for exclusion and removal as alleged national security threats and driving huge increases in immigration enforcement spending, which more than tripled in the twenty years after the new Department’s creation. Those increases funded still more programs linking the criminal legal system to immigration enforcement, leading to record numbers of deportations.

The Rise of Mass Punishment

A photo from inside a court room for a mass trial of immigrants, dressed in bright orange jumpsuits in a long line, at the Lucius D. Bunton Federal Courthouse in Pecos, Texas in 2018.
Mass trial of immigrants at the Lucius D. Bunton Federal Courthouse in Pecos, Texas | The Intercept

During this period, the Department of Justice began to more aggressively enforce the criminal entry and reentry laws originally enacted in 1929 to punish Mexican immigrants to the United States. By 2011, unlawful entry and reentry were the most-commonly prosecuted crimes in the federal court system, far outpacing even drug crimes. Illegal entry and reentry cases crammed courthouses, jail cells, and prison beds in the U.S.-Mexico border region with tens of thousands of immigrants convicted for their manner of entry each year. As from the beginning, undocumented migrants who overstayed visas were not subject to similar punishments. Mexicans and Central Americans regularly comprised 97% or more of those prosecuted for unlawful entry/reentry.

The use of immigration detention also exploded during this time, as IIRIRA created vast new legal authorities permitting the government to detain noncitizens during and after their proceedings. The Supreme Court largely validated this system, upholding the mandatory detention of non-citizens who had finished serving their criminal sentences based on the assumption that they would present a flight risk and danger to the community if released, even though many of them had lived for years with their families without incident. The number of noncitizens detained in the United States reached 55,654 in 2019, dropped during the pandemic but has since increased. For the latest data, see here.

Timeline of Key Events

With direct and indirect support from the United States government, lengthy civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the 1980s pushed about half a million refugees from those nations to flee north to the United States. While the government generously granted relief to Nicaraguans it treated Salvadorans and Guatemalans as economic migrants, and denied asylum to more than 97% of them. In American Baptist Churches (ABC) v. Thornburg, the plaintiffs, a coalition of over 80 churches, religious organizations, and refugee groups, challenged the government’s discriminatory treatment of Guatemalan and Salvadoran asylum seekers. The case resulted in a settlement requiring the government to re-adjudicate thousands of asylum claims. This created a backlog in asylum applications from these countries which, coupled with extensive advocacy from community members and immigrant rights advocates, led to the passage of the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) in 1997, which created a path to lawful residence for the population covered by the ABC settlement and other Central American immigrants. In response to a similar pattern of extensive advocacy around the unequal treatment of migrants from Haiti, Congress passed the Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act in 1998, which allowed certain Haitians to seek permanent residence status.

In Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, a group representing Haitian refugees challenged an executive order requiring the Coast Guard to interdict people fleeing Haiti at sea and return them without allowing them to raise any asylum claims. In Sale, the Supreme Court held that this practice was lawful because laws governing asylum and refugee protections in the U.S. do no operate outside of U.S. territory. This ruling opened the door to many policies externalizing border controls—both at sea and in the territory of Mexico and beyond—that limit the availability of refugee protections beyond the physical border. Today, almost no one is protected by U.S. refugee law unless they reach U.S. land.

U.S.-Mexico Border Deaths Monument | Tomas Castelazo

In 1993, the El Paso Border Patrol sector launched Operation Hold the Line. This operation deployed four hundred agents and vehicles stationed every 100 yards along the border to prevent illegal crossings. The operation’s emphasis on “deterrence” marked a dramatic shift towards militarization of the border and would serve as a model for a number of Border Patrol operations that followed. The new model has proven deadly, as it forces migrants to take ever more remote and dangerous pathways across the border.

Fast Forward to Now

In the past 25 years, nearly 10,000 migrants have died while crossing on the U.S. side of the border alone, and thousands more have disappeared. Almost all of them have been Mexican and Central American migrants attempting to enter the United States without inspection.

The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act catalyzed the connection between immigration control and the criminal legal system. The bill committed $3 billion to border enforcement technologies, such as video surveillance and ground sensors, authorized the Attorney General to “bypass deportation proceedings for certain aggravated felonies,” enhanced penalties for smuggling and passport fraud, and increased the penalty for certain illegal reentry convictions. The Crime Bill also directly linked local law enforcement to federal immigration control by launching the Law Enforcement Support Center to help local police identify undocumented immigrants in their custody and establishing the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program to reimburse states and municipalities for immigration-related incarceration expenses. The law was also a catalyst of mass incarceration, injecting $30,000,000,000 into the criminal legal system while creating dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandating life sentences for some repeat offenders, and incentivizing the hiring of 100,000 new state and local police officers. To see the visualization depicting the parallel rise in deportations and mass incarceration, go here.

In 1995, federal prosecutors along the U.S.-Mexico border invented a new type of plea bargain—known as the “fast track”—to expedite the prosecution of unlawful reentry cases and secure more guilty pleas. The “fast track” system offered defendants lower sentences, but required them to waive fundamental rights, such as the right to a grand jury indictment, to discovery, to make certain arguments for a lower sentence, and to appeal their sentence. Under fast track, the number of immigrants prosecuted for illegal re-entry soared from 7,475 in 1995 to 11,690 in FY 2004.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) made dramatic changes to virtually every aspect of the immigration enforcement system, creating the basic architecture of the modern deportation regime. It created a new category of deportations that did not require hearings before Immigration Judges, known as “expedited removal,” along with a new system to summarily screen people for asylum and reject them with little or no judicial review. Expedited removals quickly became an enforcement mechanism of choice at the border, as border patrol officials deployed it against people who previously would have been simply turned back or given voluntary departure. IIRIRA also permitted the use of expedited removal in the interior of the United States, although no administration attempted to exercise that power to the maximum extent permitted by the law until the Trump Administration.

IIRIRA changed the legal machinery of border enforcement in other significant ways as well. It narrowed the Attorney General’s authority to parole immigrants into the United States, requiring that it be issued “only on a case-by-case basis,” and established authority to force people to wait in Mexico while their immigration cases were pending. The government would gradually expand its use of those powers almost continuously over the next thirty years, including in the current administration’s most recent policies.

IIRIRA’s changes to interior immigration enforcement were equally significant. It substantially expanded the set of crimes triggering mandatory deportation regardless of an immigrant’s family ties, length of residence, and other humanitarian concerns. As the government read the law, many minor crimes—including simple drug possession offenses and other victimless offenses—triggered mandatory deportation. Although the courts would eventually narrow some of the government’s most extreme readings of these provisions, many of them remain in place today.

IIRIRA also created new rules barring individuals who have been unlawfully present for long periods of time from admission to the U.S. for up to ten years. The “unlawful presence” bars are triggered once the immigrant leaves the United States. They therefore disproportionately affect noncitizens who entered without authorization and are therefore ineligible to adjust status within the U.S., unlike those who overstayed their visas and can under certain conditions become eligible to adjust status without departing the U.S.

IIRIRA also dramatically increased the government’s authority to jail immigrants while their deportation cases were pending and, if they lost those cases, while awaiting repatriation. The government also read the law to require that many immigrants be detained during the immigration court process.

This new detention authority fueled a massive expansion in the population of jailed immigrants, as immigration authorities essentially created a new prison system for non-citizens. The population of non-citizens detained on any given day increased from about 7,475 in 1995 to more than 50,000 in 2019. According to the most-recently available data, 37,721 immigrants are detained on any given day in the United States.

IIRIRA also provided new legal authority enabling federal immigration officials to both work directly with local law enforcement officers (under so-called “287(g)” agreements, and also during times of “mass influx”) and utilize local arrest information to detain people in the name of immigration enforcement.

Fast Forward to Now

No single piece of legislation is more responsible for the massive expansion in federal detention and deportation than IIRIRA. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has significantly expanded the federal government’s capacity to apprehend undocumented immigrants by using the expanded authorities introduced by this law. For example, between January and March 2025, the Trump administration signed a historic number of 287(g) agreements with local law enforcement agencies.

A multi-million dollar initiative launched by the INS to stop undocumented border crossings through “overseas deterrence.” The program lasted four years and established 40 offices around the world where US agents focused on gathering intelligence to interrupt migration flows to the United States. This was an early example of “border externalization” operations that stop immigrants and refugees from arriving at U.S. borders.

The vast expansion in deportation authority under the 1996 laws led to the detention and deportation of many long-time lawful permanent residents with criminal convictions. Several thousand of those people were from countries that would not accept them for repatriation, including many from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Cuba who came here as refugees. The federal government claimed authority to jail them indefinitely, but the Zadvydas ruling held that Congress had only given the government about six months to detain immigrants in order to deport them. Zadvydas established a high-water mark for the rights of jailed immigrants, and is now under threat from the current Supreme Court.

Humanizing the Story
Kim Ho Ma

Kim Ho Ma, one of the individuals challenging his prolonged detention in Zadvydas, came to the U.S. as a refugee from Cambodia at two years old, and had been a permanent resident since he was six years old. He was only 17 years old when he was convicted of the crime that made him deportable. Kim Ho participated in the documentary Sentenced Home, which was released in 2007 and followed three young Cambodians, including Kim Ho, through their deportation.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, INS conducted mass dragnet operations targeting Muslim immigrant communities, mostly in the New York and New Jersey areas. The government jailed them in abusive conditions, held their deportation proceedings in secret, and refused to release them even when judges ordered them released or deported. Ultimately, not a single one of them was found to have any connection to the 9/11 attacks.

Humanizing the Story
Javaid Iqbal

Javaid Iqbal was one of the innocent men jailed during the Ashcroft raids. Details of his experiences appear very briefly in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, where the Supreme Court refers to them as “legitimate policy” producing only a “disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims.” 556 U.S. 662 (2009). Iqbal was not in fact Arab, but rather a Pakistani immigrant, and was arrested in November 2001. Iqbal’s arresting officers cited his possession of a letter from the INS and a magazine reporting on the 9/11 attacks to accuse him of being a terrorist sympathizer. Iqbal was detained and later transferred to a jail unit with other inmates arrested in the raids, where he was severely beaten by correctional officers at least twice and endured six months of psychological torture. Ultimately, in 2003, Iqbal agreed to voluntary removal and was deported to Pakistan.

The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), required men admitted on non-immigrant visas from 25 countries, 24 of which were majority-Muslim (the other was North Korea), to report to immigration enforcement officers for interrogation. In the ten years that NSEERS was in effect, 80,000 noncitizens were subject to registration, nearly 3,000 were detained, and over 13,000 were placed in deportation proceedings. None of them were ever found to have engaged in terrorist activity. Advocates challenged NSEERS in court, arguing that it was discriminatory, but the courts rejected those challenges. NSEERS was discontinued in 2011 and rescinded in 2016.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 combined a number of preexisting agencies including Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Border Patrol into a vast new agency called the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It began operation on March 1, 2003. Within DHS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) inherited the powers of INS and the Border Patrol. The number of people detained and deported under the immigration laws has greatly increased since the creation of DHS, as has federal spending on immigration enforcement.

Demore upheld IIRIRA’s mandatory detention provision, which requires the detention of all noncitizens with certain criminal convictions during their removal proceedings, even if they present no flight risk or danger. The Supreme Court subsequently read the law to require detention for the entire duration of removal proceedings, no matter how long they take. Mandatory detention serves as a crucial tool in advancing mass deportation, because people are far less likely to challenge their deportation when jailed.

A photo from inside a court room for a mass trial of immigrants, dressed in bright orange jumpsuits in a long line, at the Lucius D. Bunton Federal Courthouse in Pecos, Texas in 2018.
Mass trial at federal Courthouse, Pecos, Texas.
Operation Streamline applies a “zero tolerance” approach to illegal entry/reentry prosecutions, using the fast-track method to facilitate mass proceedings in which as many as 80 immigrants are prosecuted together in a single hearing, with defendants pleading guilty en masse. By 2011, Streamline had made unlawful entry/re-entry the most-commonly prosecuted charges in the history of U.S. federal criminal law. Mexicans and Central Americans typically comprise 97% of all persons charged with such violations, making the enforcement of unlawful entry and re-entry charges one of the most highly racialized domains of the U.S. criminal legal system.
The Criminal Alien Program (CAP), which is currently Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s largest deportation program, is responsible for between ⅔ and ¾ of all deportations from the U.S. It allows ICE officials access to local and state jails to interrogate people without a lawyer present.ICE agents use this information to identify people to send to immigration detention facilities. During some periods it has accounted for as much as ⅔ to ¾ of all deportations from the U.S. Because it piggybacks on state criminal legal systems, CAP ensures that ICE’s enforcement policies mirror the discrimination inherent in those regimes.
Authorized the construction of 700 miles of double-layered fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border and required the Department of Homeland Security to achieve “operational control” of the U.S.-Mexico boundary.
The Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP) targeted certain people trying to immigrate but who were deemed a “national security concern.” Once flagged, an application for benefits cannot be granted, even if there is no lawful basis to deny it. CARRP overwhelmingly affects Muslims and people from countries with large Muslim populations, including thousands of people seeking to naturalize. Applicants flagged under CARRP have no notice or opportunity to challenge their designation as national security concerns, even though the program “relies on deeply flawed mechanisms to identify ‘national security concerns,’ including error-ridden and overbroad watch-list systems and security checks; and religious, national origin, and associational profiling.” In 2025, a court found the CARRP program unlawful.

Secure Communities (S-Comm) created a data sharing system between federal immigration enforcement and state and local law enforcement agencies. Under S-Comm, whenever local authorities fingerprinted someone, their prints were automatically shared with federal immigration authorities. Federal authorities would then order local officials to detain the targeted immigrant until federal agents could take them. By 2013, the program operated in every prison and jail in the United States. ​​The net effect, according to former ICE Secretary Julie L. Myers, was to “create a virtual ICE presence at every local jail.” S-Comm was crucial to the Obama Administration’s mass deportation policy, which led to the removal of 3 million people. A detailed study of data concerning where ICE chose to introduce S-Comm revealed that ICE targeted communities with high percentages of Latino migrants (rather than, for example, high crime areas). As the study’s authors explained, “[i]t is very difficult to square the lack of any meaningful correlation between early activation and local crime rates with the government’s putative desire to target immigration enforcement resources in a manner designed to reduce the incidence of serious crime by noncitizens.” Instead, they found, “the data reveal that early activation in the program correlates strongly with whether a county has a large Hispanic population . . . [the correlation] persists even when we control for myriad other factors.” Similarly, scholars have documented how collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement allows the well-documented anti-Black racism in the criminal legal system to create particularly high detention and removal rates for Black immigrants.

Eventually, many state and local jurisdictions adopted “sanctuary” policies that forbade their law enforcement authorities from sharing information with federal immigration authorities in some or all cases. However, data-sharing and other forms of state and local immigration enforcement remain in place in many other parts of the country.

The population of immigrants jailed by ICE increased rapidly after 1996, but exploded after 2009. In that year, Congress began requiring the Department of Homeland Security to maintain at least 33,400 immigrant detention beds daily. In 2017, Congress ended the mandate, but by FY 2019, the average daily population of jailed immigrants hit a historic high of 50,165. The number of immigrants in detention dropped during the COVID pandemic but has since increased. As of July 14, 2024, ICE held 37,004 immigrants in detention. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans compose 89% of detained immigrants. Immigrants from Black-majority countries also report a disproportionate share of abuse in detention. Approximately 1% of the immigrants in detention are from Europe or Canada.
After the DREAM Act, which would have provided a path to permanent status for certain undocumented youth, failed to pass Congress, President Obama, under pressure from undocumented organizers, announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA offers temporary protection from deportation and employment authorization on a renewable two-year basis to certain undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. At one point the program protected more than 800,000 undocumented people, 80% of whom were Mexican (and 10% of whom were Central American). While providing crucial temporary deportation relief for those who qualified, DACA fell short of the permanent relief the DREAM Act would have provided, and indeed no broad legalization law has passed Congress since 1986. In 2017, the Trump administration attempted to terminate DACA; however, in 2020, the Supreme Court overturned that termination, but on-going litigation has closed the program to new applicants for the last five years. A final decision on DACA’s legality is likely in the next few years.

The United States begins paying Mexico $2 million annually to deport Central American migrants to their home countries. Externalizing U.S. border control to Mexico further diminished the rights of Central American migrants. According to the historian Adam Goodman, “Mexico was not a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, nor the subsequent 1967 protocol. Moreover, under Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution the government had the right to deport foreigners without due process. As a result, migrants faced abuse from Mexican migration officials, police, and criminals alike.”

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump promised a “total and complete ban on Muslims entering the United States.” Once in office, Trump issued Executive Order 13769 barring entry for individuals from seven Muslim-majority countries. In response to legal challenges the administration modified the ban twice. The Supreme Court upheld it in Trump v. Hawaii, ruling that the Trump administration’s stated national security rationale justified the order. The Court ruled it need not consider any evidence purporting to support the order or the President’s numerous racist remarks justifying it.

Fast Forward to Now

In 2025, the second Trump Administration adopted a new, more expansive ban that covers nineteen countries for near-complete or partial immigration bans, including many nations in Africa as well as Haiti and Venezuela—two countries from which very large numbers of immigrants have come to this country seeking humanitarian protection in recent years.

The Trump administration terminated the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of 400,000 immigrants, many of whom had lived here for decades, from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan. In rejecting a proposal to grant them permanent status, Trump called immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and unspecified African nations “people from shithole countries” and suggested the U.S. should have more migration from countries “like Norway” instead. TPS holders and their U.S. citizen children successfully sued to halt the terminations. The federal court decision in their favor relied in part on the detailed evidence of racism motivating the decision. In June of 2023, the Biden administration ended the lawsuit by restoring TPS for those countries.

Fast Forward to Now

Since January 2025, the second Trump administration has taken a number of steps to end TPS for large groups of people, including Venezuelans, Haitians, and others. Immigrants’ rights advocates have challenged these efforts in court.

On April 11, 2017, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute all undocumented border crossers, which it used as an excuse to justify its family separation policy. In fact, it applied that policy to families who requested asylum at ports of entry, and continued separation long after any criminal charges were resolved. When announcing the program at a press conference in San Diego, Attorney General Sessions stated, “It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth.” Federal authorities seized nearly 5,000 children from their parents with no mechanism in place to reunite children with their parents once released from custody. On June 20, 2018, President Trump issued an executive order to end family separations but, as of April 16, 2024, 1,401 children had yet to be reunited with their families.

 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government invoked Title 42, a 1944 public health law, to quickly expel immigrants at the border and deny entry to asylum seekers. This provision was applied in a discriminatory manner. In 2021, the government summarily expelled over 15,000 Haitian asylum seekers, mostly under this authority, despite having just deemed Haiti unsafe. In contrast, it exempted Ukrainians fleeing the war with Russia and allowed them to cross the border. See our data visualization here for more on the government’s use of Title 42 expulsions to accomplish forcible removal.

In 2021 and 2022, the federal government utilized three large-scale programs to allow people from certain countries facing humanitarian or political crises to enter the United States. After the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, the Biden Administration created strict rules and rigorous procedural requirements for Afghan nationals seeking humanitarian protection in the United States. The government processed only about 8,000 of the 60,000 applications and granted only 123 of them. The program effectively ceased in November 2021.

In contrast, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the government established a far more generous parole program for Ukrainians. As of March 2024, more than 187,000 Ukrainians had arrived in the United States under the “U4U” program, and immigration officials had approved nearly 50,000 more. Overall, more than half a million Ukrainians have come to the United States since the war.

The government has since launched similar parole programs for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (collectively known as the CHNV Program). Unlike the Ukraine program, the CHNV Program contains a numerical cap limiting the number of people who can be paroled into the country each month to 30,000 per month (total). About 500,000 people have come to the U.S. under it. Texas and other states challenged it in court, but lost. On March 25, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced its plan to terminate the CHNV Program. Immigrants’ rights groups have challenged that action in court.

On June 4, 2024, President Biden issued “A Proclamation on Securing the Border,” which bars access to asylum for nearly all people seeking protection at the border other than those given advance appointments to do so. This ban remained in effect through the end of President Biden’s term. On January 20, 2025, President Donald J. Trump suspended all refugee admissions into the United States. On February 7, 2025, President Trump made an exception to this suspension by offering refugee status to Afrikaners, the white descendants of Apartheid in South Africa.

On July 1, 2024, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the U.S. Department of State would begin to provide the government of Panama with funds to “remove foreign nationals who do not have a legal basis to remain in Panama.” Conceived of as a regional approach to stopping migrants, including asylum seekers, who cross the Darien Gap from reaching the United States, it is a program that “externalizes” U.S. immigration control priorities and operations.

Fast Forward to Now

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the government has reached several international agreements to deport migrants to so-called “third countries” (i.e., countries to which migrants have no prior connection). The administration has sent Mexicans and Laotians to South Sudan, for example. Immigrants’ rights advocates sued to challenge this practice, arguing that such individuals must be afforded an opportunity to raise asylum and related claims to challenge their deportation to third countries, but the Supreme Court has allowed it to continue.

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