The Trump administration’s aggressive expansion of third-country deportations has marked another milestone, with six deported migrants arriving in Guyana over the weekend as part of a newly struck bilateral agreement. The group, made up of Cuban and Afghan nationals deported over U.S. immigration violations, touched down in the South American nation on Saturday, Guyana’s Foreign Secretary Robert Persaud confirmed in comments to The Associated Press.
Persaud added that none of the six arrivals have a criminal record, and that the U.S. has not submitted additional requests for deportations to Guyana at this stage. The one-year agreement between Washington and Georgetown, finalized after months of closed-door negotiations, does not grant permanent resettlement status to deportees, according to the Guyanese official.
Third-country deportation is a policy that involves sending non-citizens detained by U.S. immigration authorities to nations that are not their country of origin. For many deportees, this means being relocated to a country they have no prior connection to, where they may not speak the local language or have any social or economic support network. The Trump administration has pushed to scale up this practice rapidly during its second term, framing the policy as a solution to the problem of origin countries that refuse to re-admit their citizens deported from the U.S.
Amnesty International, a leading global human rights nonprofit, reports that more than 30 countries worldwide have now signed similar third-country deportation agreements with the U.S. since Trump returned to office, 15 of which are located across the Americas.
Critics of the policy have raised widespread alarm over its ethical and humanitarian implications. Human rights groups denounce the practice as a deliberate punitive measure designed to coerce migrants into abandoning their asylum and immigration claims in the U.S. The expansion of third-country deportations also aligns with a broader trend in Trump’s second-term immigration agenda: data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research institute based at Syracuse University, shows that 70.6 percent of all foreign nationals currently held in U.S. immigration detention have no criminal convictions, confirming that the administration’s deportation sweep extends far beyond the criminal targets Trump highlighted during his 2024 re-election campaign.
Additional concerns center on the conditions migrants face in third-party receiving countries. Many of the nations that have signed agreements with the U.S. grapple with systemic poverty, political instability, ongoing armed conflict, and widespread human rights violations, creating dangerous conditions for newly arrived deportees.
In the case of the six migrants sent to Guyana, the United Nations International Organisation for Migration (IOM) will provide initial support through its Assisted Voluntary Return Programme. The deportees will remain in Guyana while their immigration cases are processed, with two potential end outcomes: repatriation to their countries of origin, or resettlement in a third country.
The new Guyana agreement is just one piece of the sweeping immigration crackdown that has defined Trump’s second term in office. The administration has already revoked legal status for tens of thousands of migrants already residing in the U.S. by canceling long-standing programs including Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole. Recent reports also indicate that officials are preparing to revoke visas for roughly 200,000 ongoing asylum seekers, a move that would push those individuals into deportation eligibility regardless of whether dangerous conflict or instability persists in their home countries.