A Journey From Hope to Despair: One Man’s Fight Against Third-Country Deportation

When Jose Yugar-Cruz reached the Arizona-Mexico border nearly two years ago during the scorching July heat, he did what he believed was the right thing—he immediately surrendered himself to Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities and requested asylum. His case represents a troubling trend in American immigration policy that has transformed what should be protection from persecution into a legal labyrinth ending in removal to unfamiliar lands. In January 2025, although his asylum claim was denied, Yugar-Cruz received what initially seemed like a lifeline: a court order preventing his deportation back to his home country. An immigration judge had determined that it was more likely than not that he would face torture or persecution if forced to return. He was among approximately 4,000 migrants who received similar protections last year, a designation known as “withholding of removal.” However, this legal victory proved hollow, as it merely triggered a prolonged legal battle during which he remained locked in detention, uncertain of his fate and separated from his family during some of life’s most painful moments.

The Reality of Withholding Orders and Third-Country Deportations

The protection that Yugar-Cruz received—a withholding of removal order—differs significantly from traditional asylum in critical ways that many people don’t understand. While it acknowledges that a person faces genuine danger in their home country, this type of relief doesn’t create any pathway to legal permanent residence in the United States. More importantly, it includes a loophole that the current administration has exploited aggressively: it allows for deportation to third countries, nations where the individual has no ties, family, or familiarity. Under previous presidential administrations, the practical difficulties of finding countries willing to accept deportees with whom they had no connection meant that most people granted withholding of removal orders ended up remaining in the United States indefinitely, even without a formal legal status. But the landscape has changed dramatically. Immigration policy experts have observed that the Trump administration has fundamentally altered this equation through aggressive diplomatic efforts and a willingness to use deportation as a deterrent message rather than simply as an enforcement mechanism. As Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, explained to CBS News, “The Trump administration is trying to speed up the process and in some ways trying to go out of their way to make the process punitive for migrants to try to send a message.” This shift represents a dramatic departure from how these protections have historically functioned in practice.

A Global Network of Deportation Agreements

Beginning in February of last year, the Trump administration launched a coordinated international campaign to sign agreements with countries worldwide to accept third-country deportees, while simultaneously ramping up arrests of those who had been granted withholding of removal orders. The administration’s approach was articulated with striking bluntness by Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a Cabinet meeting celebrating President Trump’s first 100 days back in office. “We are working with other countries to say, ‘We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries. Will you do that as a favor to us?'” Rubio stated, adding, “And the further away from America the better, so they can’t come back across the border.” This strategy has resulted in deportees—both those with criminal records and those without—being sent to an array of distant countries including Ghana, Cameroon, South Sudan, and El Salvador. Perhaps most troubling, many of these individuals were ultimately sent back to their home countries according to court records and congressional reports, despite U.S. immigration judges having specifically ruled that they would face torture or persecution there. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has become one of the latest nations to join this network, now standing as the 28th country to accept third-country deportees. According to court records in Yugar-Cruz’s case, ICE stated that the DRC “provided diplomatic assurances” that deportees sent there would not be persecuted or tortured, though such assurances offer little comfort to those facing removal to a country where they know no one and don’t speak the language.

The Temporary Fiction and Its Human Cost

On April 17, a group of 15 South American deportees arrived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to an official government announcement from that country. Written in French, the announcement characterized the arrangement as “strictly transitory, temporary, and limited in time.” This temporary framing is a consistent feature across third-country deportation agreements, according to Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, one of the organizations monitoring these deportations. “They’re sold to other countries as temporary,” she explained to CBS News, noting that “the vast majority of these folks are going to leave, or be repatriated.” The South American deportees who arrived in the DRC told NPR that they were essentially given no viable options other than eventually returning to their home country—the very outcome that their legal protections were supposed to prevent. At least one of these deportees, a woman from Colombia, had actually been granted legal protections specifically preventing her deportation, according to Reuters. “That is where the fundamental problem comes,” Schacher emphasized. “It’s sort of an end run around those protections.” For Yugar-Cruz, who requested that his native South American country be withheld to protect him from retaliation, the attempted removals began early in 2025 when ICE tried unsuccessfully to deport him to Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Mexico, and Canada. Each refusal by these countries to accept him should have been a signal that his case was exceptional, yet the search for somewhere—anywhere—to send him continued until the DRC agreed.

A Brief Taste of Freedom, Then Back to Detention

Earlier this year, Yugar-Cruz experienced a brief window of hope when a federal court ruled that his detention, which had spanned 17 months by that point, was unlawful. He was released from ICE detention and began rebuilding his life during those three months of freedom. “I was starting to live in freedom,” he recalled in the emotional joint interview he gave to CBS News and The Minneapolis Star Tribune from his detention facility in Iowa, speaking in Spanish. But that freedom was short-lived. In April, after ICE received notification that the Democratic Republic of the Congo would accept him, agents detained him once again. The despair in his voice was palpable as he described his current situation: “I was starting to live in freedom, but they detained me again. I lost my mother while detained. I can’t help my children. I’m here detained. I feel like a person who has no value.” The loss of his mother while being held in custody, unable to comfort her or attend her funeral, represents the kind of profound human cost that statistics cannot capture. Yugar-Cruz was originally scheduled to be on the manifest for the first deportation flight to the DRC in mid-April, but his ongoing federal court case temporarily delayed his removal. While third-country deportations constitute a relatively small fraction of total deportations—the Migration Policy Institute estimates about 15,000 out of more than 605,000 total deportations between January 20 and December 31, 2025—the practice serves a purpose beyond the numbers, according to Ruiz Soto. “Even small numbers of people being sent to other countries in chains, that made it much more visible than in the past for people to be essentially scared into saying ‘this could be me, this could happen to me,'” he explained.

Legal Challenges and an Uncertain Future

The Department of Homeland Security currently faces a class-action lawsuit brought by those granted withholding of removal, arguing that before being removed to a third country, immigrants should have an opportunity to raise concerns about being persecuted or tortured in that destination country. While a lower court initially placed a stay on removals while this litigation was pending, the Supreme Court lifted that stay in June 2025, allowing deportations to continue. In February of this year, a district court ruled that DHS’s third-country removal practices were actually unlawful, representing a significant victory for immigrant advocates. However, that ruling was stayed pending the government’s appeal, meaning the deportations could continue uninterrupted while the legal arguments played out. The federal judge handling Yugar-Cruz’s specific case cited the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling in his decision, describing it as “all but fatal to Yugar-Cruz’s claim,” which left him with “little choice but to deny” the motion to release Yugar-Cruz from detention. On Monday, that same judge cleared the way for ICE to deport him to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “I feel truly, truly devastated by what is happening to me,” the 37-year-old told reporters. “It is a country I don’t know, I have no family there, I don’t speak their language—as far as I understand I think it’s French. I don’t know what the process will be like there, I don’t know if I’ll continue to be detained. I keep thinking it’s a nightmare that I will wake up from.” His deportation could happen any day now, though ICE agents haven’t given him a specific date. His attorney, Alison Griffith, said her legal team asked ICE to consider sending him to a Spanish-speaking country closer to his home region instead of the DRC, but officials refused. Despite everything, Yugar-Cruz maintains a thread of hope: “I still have faith that maybe some miracle could happen in my case and that they would give me my freedom again.” He expressed deep gratitude to the Iowa-based advocates who rallied around him during his brief months of freedom, saying, “It is as if they filled that empty space that my mother left in me—those people filled it.”