The Hidden Cost of America’s Third-Country Deportation Policy: How Asylum Seekers Are Forced to Abandon Hope

A System That Breaks People Before They Get Their Day in Court

Willian Yacelga Benalcazar’s story reveals a troubling reality playing out in immigration courts across America. After fleeing Ecuador to escape threats from criminal gangs, he found himself facing deportation—not back to Ecuador, but to Honduras, a country he had no connection to. His five months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention became a nightmare of illness, inadequate food, and contaminated drinking water. Eventually, exhausted and sick, Yacelga made a heartbreaking choice: he gave up his asylum case and asked to return to Ecuador rather than spend three or four more months fighting for his freedom. “All I wanted was to get out, to be free, because it’s horrible being locked up in there,” he told CBS News from Ecuador. His experience isn’t unique—it’s becoming the norm under the Trump administration’s aggressive third-country deportation strategy, a policy that immigration experts say is designed more to instill fear than to actually remove large numbers of people from the country.

The Scale and Strategy Behind Third-Country Deportations

Since President Trump returned to office, approximately 17,500 people have been deported to third countries according to Third Country Deportation Watch, a monitoring organization run by Refugees International and Human Rights First. While this represents only about 2% of total deportations carried out during Trump’s second term so far, the true impact extends far beyond these numbers. The real power of this policy lies in its psychological effect on the much larger population of asylum seekers it threatens. More than 75,500 asylum cases have received motions to “pretermit”—a legal term meaning to terminate proceedings without ever hearing the merits of the case. This practice remained relatively rare until October 2025, when the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that immigration judges must decide on third-country removal motions before even considering whether someone qualifies for asylum. This procedural change fundamentally altered the asylum process, forcing immigrants to prove they face persecution not just in their home countries, but also in third-party nations like Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Uganda—countries that have signed “asylum cooperative agreements” with the U.S. administration allowing America to reroute asylum seekers to their territories.

When Fear Becomes Policy: The Human Toll of Impossible Choices

The statistics paint a disturbing picture of a system that wears people down until they surrender. Among cases where motions to pretermit were filed, approximately 16%—roughly 12,300 people—withdrew their asylum claims, abandoned their cases, or agreed to leave voluntarily. Immigration attorneys and advocates describe this as psychological warfare. Victoria Neilson, supervising attorney at the National Immigration Project, explained the impossible calculation these vulnerable people must make: “The third countries people are being removed to are often very dangerous countries themselves that don’t have a functioning asylum system. There’s a lot of reasons for people to be afraid and I guess choose the devil you know over the one you know nothing about.” Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, characterized the entire approach succinctly: third-country deportations “have more to do with fear than scale.” The policy creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and dread that accomplishes what straightforward deportation cannot—it convinces people seeking refuge to give up on finding safety entirely, often choosing to return to the very dangers they fled rather than endure indefinite detention or the uncertainty of being sent to yet another unfamiliar and potentially dangerous country.

An Unworkable System Creating Thousands of Legal Ghosts

The practical implementation of this policy reveals its fundamental dysfunction. Immigration attorneys express serious doubts about the feasibility of actually deporting the massive number of people who have received third-country removal orders. The numbers simply don’t add up. Honduras, for example, agreed to accept only ten non-Honduran deportees per month, yet more than 6,300 non-Hondurans had received deportation orders to that country by the end of March. As of late April, only about 60 had actually been removed to Honduras. This creates what Atlanta immigration attorney Adriana Heffley describes as an inevitable crisis: “I believe what we’re seeing now is the inevitable result of forcing judges to order immigrants deported to third countries that have not agreed to accept them. There are thousands of people now with deportation orders that cannot be carried out.” More than 24,000 people have received removal orders to third countries under these agreements, but ICE has not disclosed how many have actually been deported and did not respond to inquiries from CBS News. In mid-March, The Seattle Times reported that ICE attorneys received an email directing them not to file new pretermit motions, though cases with existing motions could continue forward. Meanwhile, about 13,300 cases—more than half of those with third-country removal orders—remain stalled in appeals, with the Board of Immigration Appeals having decided less than 1% by the end of March.

The Detention Trap: Where Hope Goes to Die

For the approximately 1,800 people with third-country removal orders who remain in detention, the situation becomes even more desperate. While appeals typically pause deportation, waiting for a decision can take years—the BIA averaged two years to rule on case appeals last year, though the turnaround is somewhat faster for detained individuals at about ten months. During this limbo, detainees like Yacelga endure conditions that steadily erode their will to continue fighting. Yacelga was transferred between five different detention facilities across the country, sometimes handcuffed for entire days during transfers. He spent most of his time in Eloy, Arizona—thousands of miles from his wife, children, and legal team in New York. For over a month, his family and attorney didn’t even know where he was. When he requested release on bond, a judge denied him. Carlos Trujillo, an immigration attorney in Provo, Utah, explained the cruel calculus: “Unless a federal court steps in and says that their detention is unreasonable or illegal and they release them—otherwise, they will keep you there. It’s the psychological warfare of trying to push you to just give up.” The Department of Homeland Security, in a statement to CBS News, emphasized Yacelga’s alleged criminal charges—larceny and criminal possession of stolen property—though Yacelga was never prosecuted and the charges were merely pending when he was detained. The DHS spokesperson framed his case within the administration’s larger narrative: “President Trump’s message has been clear: criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.”

The Aftermath: Lives Shattered, Families Separated, Questions Unanswered

Two weeks after his deportation to Ecuador, Yacelga spoke to CBS News about his continuing struggles. He still battled symptoms from the virus he contracted in detention, leaving him too sick to work. Before his detention, he had provided for his family; now they remained in New York with the money he had left them, while he tried to rebuild a life in the country he had fled. “What I want is to forget all that and start over because it was horrible being imprisoned without having committed any crime, just for wanting to, well, try to take care of your family,” he said. His case exemplifies a broader pattern that has immigration advocates deeply concerned. A federal lawsuit currently pending challenges the practice of pretermitting asylum cases under third-country agreements, accusing the government of subverting due process and arguing that the countries involved have inadequate asylum systems. Yet the policy continues, creating what experts describe as thousands of legal ghosts—people with removal orders that cannot be executed, appeals that may take years to resolve, and cases terminated before the merits were ever heard. The data analyzed by CBS News covers immigration court proceedings from January 2025 through March 2026, revealing a system that has fundamentally transformed how asylum cases are handled. While immigration court data doesn’t specify whether all pretermit motions relate to asylum cooperative agreements, interviews with multiple immigration attorneys and analysis from the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies indicate the vast majority do. What emerges is a picture of a policy that achieves its goals not through effective deportation but through creating conditions so intolerable that people abandon their search for safety—returning to danger or accepting deportation to unknown countries rather than enduring the system designed, it seems, to break their spirit before it ever hears their case.