How Trump Turned a Refugee Bureau Into a $410 Million Deportation Operation

The U.S. diplomat arrived in West Africa in mid-June with little fanfare, hopscotching along the Atlantic coastline for scheduled visits with senior government officials in the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Togo and Gabon, whose president greeted him inside an opulent seaside palace.

The American, a career State Department official named Christian Ehrhardt, was an unlikely diplomatic VIP. For nearly two decades, he served as an officer in the agency’s security branch, focusing on embassy protection, before being summoned to Washington last year to lead a new initiative — the Office of Remigration.

Since then, Ehrhardt, 41, has crisscrossed Africa, trying to persuade the continent’s leaders to accept flights full of people deported from the United States even though the migrants are not their own citizens. These “third country” deportation deals, a controversial innovation of the second Trump administration, have become a central part of the president’s hard-line approach to immigration, and they’re negotiated by the office Ehrhardt now oversees.

He has been making rapid progress. The Trump administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate agreements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, as of the end of June, according to internal government records reviewed by The Washington Post. {snip}

Under the arrangements, the U.S. has expelled migrants to countries across the globe where they have no previous connection. Early deals included flights to Costa Rica carrying migrants from China, Russia, Iran and Afghanistan and a flight to the tiny African kingdom of Eswatini with migrants from Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and Jamaica.

The agreements have been secured under the orders of Stephen Miller, a long-standing aide to the president who now serves as White House deputy chief of staff. Current and former officials say that Miller, known for his relentless anti-immigration focus, has been able to push key appointments at the State Department that have allowed him to overrule other foreign policy objectives in his goal of achieving more deportations.

Ehrhardt is “considered a White House envoy” when he meets with foreign leaders, said a U.S. official familiar with his meetings. “The messaging is not just that he is a deputy assistant secretary of state. He’s really part of the White House, so they roll out the red carpet.” {snip}

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The Office of Remigration — a division of about 15 employees in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) — marks an extraordinary break in U.S. foreign policy, inverting the nation’s long-standing commitment to resettling refugees in need into an intensive focus on expelling them from the country. The office’s name itself is a point of contention, as the term “remigration” has been popularized by white nationalists in Europe who seek the expulsion of racial minorities and immigrants.

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At the center of the new system of third-country deportations is the State Department. Civil servants who spent their careers in humanitarian efforts are now tasked with helping the administration cajole countries into accepting migrants from around the world with little regard for the treatment they will receive once they depart the U.S.

Days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order suspending the processing of all refugees except White South Africans, all but shuttering a program through which the Biden administration had admitted more than 100,000 refugees in 2024.

The State Department severed long-standing contracts with U.S.-based resettlement groups and reappropriated $250 million from refugee aid programs to help finance “Project Homecoming,” a Department of Homeland Security initiative aimed at incentivizing migrants to voluntarily leave the country. Agency staffers were reassigned to monitor databases with information on deportation flights, the mounting tally of deportees and the costs of the contracts.

Administration officials say third-country deportations are the only way to remove the most difficult-to-deport migrants, including violent criminals who have committed rapes and murders. These migrants have final removal orders from U.S. immigration judges, but many are protected by federal law from being sent back to home countries where they are likely to face persecution. Others cannot be returned because their home countries refuse to accept them.

But immigration attorneys said the administration’s policy is a loophole to send migrants to third countries that, in turn, forcibly expel them to the dangerous homelands they fled — a process known as “refoulement” that violates international refugee treaties. On Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that the policy is unlawful, upholding a lower-court judge’s decision in a class-action case that the deportees were denied sufficient notice and the chance to raise fear-based claims against specific third countries. The Trump administration is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court.

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So far, the administration has deported more than 25,000 people to at least 28 third countries, according to an analysis for this story based on data collected from several independent sources, including Third-Country Deportation Watch — a tracking site run by Refugees International and Human Rights First — and the Berkeley Human Rights Center Investigation Lab. The vast majority, about 20,000, have been sent to Mexico, which has an informal agreement with the United States, and nearly all of the rest have been deported to countries in Africa and Latin America.

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Days after the president’s inauguration, the State Department placed a sweeping freeze on foreign assistance and initiated a review of thousands of humanitarian grants to determine whether they violated the president’s executive order banning federal programs based on diversity, equity and inclusion.

The agency eliminated 4,100 of the grants — about 45 percent of all of its humanitarian programs — and the Department of Government Efficiency, run by tech magnate Elon Musk, cut 92 percent of the spending initiatives overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was shut down entirely.

Months later, the administration notified Congress that it was pursuing a broad restructuring of the State Department, sending lawmakers a 136-page memo that included plans for a new Office of Remigration. {snip}

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Even as the number of agreements grows, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has struggled to find migrants that fit the requirements and deportation flights are often sparsely populated, people with knowledge of the situation said.

The documents show that the majority of deportation slots available in the third countries remain unfilled. For example, only three migrants have been sent to Palau since the U.S. agreed in December to pay the country $7.5 million to accept up to 75 deportees, according to the internal State Department documents and people familiar with the deal.

But the administration has continued to push forward. In late August, a U.S. deportation flight landed in Liberia. Six third-country nationals on board — four Cuban men, a Brazilian man and a Cameroonian woman — refused to leave the plane, expressing fears that they would be placed in danger.

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