Last year, Donald Trump’s administration spent more than $40 million to send hundreds of migrants to at least two dozen countries that were not their countries of origin. Senate Democrats, in a report released on Friday, described the practice as a costly instrument of intimidation embedded in the president’s campaign of mass deportations.
In a 30-page analysis prepared by the minority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the administration is accused of striking opaque financial arrangements with foreign governments, including states with troubling records on corruption and human rights. According to the authors, these deals made it possible to rapidly expand the use of deportations to “third countries”—a measure that had previously been applied only in exceptional circumstances.
The authors of the report argue that the State Department failed to provide adequate oversight of how the allocated funds were spent and did not ensure that migrants transferred to these countries were protected from violence or mistreatment. “The administration has expanded and institutionalized a system in which the United States persuades—or effectively coerces—other countries into accepting migrants who are not their citizens, often through agreements that prove costly, ineffective, and weakly supervised,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the leading Democrat on the committee, wrote in a letter to colleagues. In her words, deporting migrants to countries with which they have no ties has become a “routine tool of diplomacy.”
The administration says it has no alternative but to work with countries willing to accept undocumented migrants when their countries of origin refuse to do so. Officials maintain that, in most cases, the individuals involved have criminal records, though publicly available data show that some have not been convicted of crimes in the United States.
The Democrats’ report—the most detailed examination to date of the third-country deportation program—documents that the United States sent migrants to two dozen such countries. Particular attention is paid to five states—El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, Eswatini, and Palau—with which the Trump administration concluded agreements involving direct payments totaling $32 million, a committee member said on condition of anonymity.
Under these arrangements, around 250 Venezuelan migrants were sent last spring to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Another 29 people were deported to Equatorial Guinea, 15 to Eswatini, and seven to Rwanda. Palau, the report notes, did not receive any migrants. Separately, the document estimates that more than $7 million was spent on organizing deportation flights to ten third countries.
“Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent without meaningful oversight or accountability,” Shaheen emphasized. “Speed and deterrence are being prioritized over due process and respect for human rights.”
In response, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said the report highlights the “unprecedented” work carried out by the administration in its first year to enforce immigration law. “It is striking that some in Congress want to return to the situation just 14 months ago, when cartels freely poisoned Americans and the border was effectively open,” he said. “Make no mistake: President Trump has brought an end to the Biden-era of mass illegal immigration, and we are all safer as a result.”
The strategy of deportations to third countries has sparked public backlash and a series of court challenges that slowed the administration’s actions and, in some cases, forced it to change course. Last spring, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act—a rarely used statute originally aimed at hostile combatants—to justify sending Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. Authorities claimed that many were linked to the transnational gang Tren de Aragua, allegations that relatives and lawyers disputed.
Those men were later transferred from El Salvador to Venezuela as part of a prisoner exchange. On Thursday, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the administration must return some of the deported Venezuelans to the United States while their lawsuits are considered. “It bears emphasizing that this situation would not have arisen at all had the government ensured the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights prior to deportation,” wrote James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court, in his decision.
The analysis took more than eight months to prepare and was based on interviews with foreign and U.S. officials, lawyers for the deported migrants, and human-rights organizations, a committee staffer said. According to him, the aim of the report is to document the costs of the chosen course at a moment when Democrats fear the government is “entering a new phase” of accelerated deal-making with third countries and a ramp-up in the pace of deportations.
The authors also fault the administration for pursuing deportation policies at the expense of other U.S. interests, including the promotion of human rights and efforts to counter corrupt regimes. They note, in particular, that the $7.5 million paid to Equatorial Guinea to accept migrants exceeded the total amount of U.S. assistance provided to the country over the previous eight years. The report cites the State Department’s 2025 Trafficking in Persons report, which raised concerns about “corruption and official complicity in trafficking-related crimes.”
The document further argues that the administration acted hastily in arranging deportations to third countries, without attempting to reach agreements with the countries of origin of some migrants. In one case, a man initially sent to Eswatini was later transferred to Jamaica, where authorities said they had never refused to take him back. “As a result, the Trump administration in some instances paid twice for migrants’ flights—first to a third country and then back to their home country,” the report states.