More than 75,500 asylum seekers have had their cases targeted for third-country removal, and roughly 12,300 have abandoned their claims — not because they lost, but because the conditions of detention made continuing impossible.
Deported to a Country You’ve Never Lived In
Willian Yacelga Benalcazar fled Ecuador after receiving threats from criminal gangs. He crossed into the United States, told an immigration judge he feared returning home, and asked for asylum. The judge’s response: deportation to Honduras — a country he had never lived in.
He spent five months in ICE detention, transferred between five different facilities across the country, handcuffed for entire days during transfers, separated from his wife, children, and attorney in New York for over a month without his family knowing where he was. He caught a virus in detention. He says he fought for food and drank water contaminated with chlorine.
Eventually, he gave up. He withdrew his asylum case and agreed to be sent back to Ecuador — not because he won or lost on the merits, but because he could not survive what came with fighting.
“I believe we abandoned the asylum case because the lawyer told me I could be in detention for three, four additional months. I was already sick in there. I couldn’t take it anymore,” Yacelga told CBS News. “All I wanted was to get out, to be free, because it’s horrible being locked up in there.”
His story is not an outlier. It is the intended result of a deliberate strategy.
What Third-Country Deportations Actually Are
Since Trump returned to office, the administration has signed what it calls “asylum cooperative agreements” with several countries — including Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Uganda. Under these agreements, the US can redirect asylum seekers to those countries rather than processing their claims here, forcing people to seek protection in nations they have no connection to.
The legal mechanism being used is a court ruling from October 2025, when the Board of Immigration Appeals — the appellate body that oversees US immigration courts — ruled that judges must consider third-country removal before they can evaluate whether someone qualifies for asylum in the United States. That ruling turned what had been a rare procedural maneuver into a mass practice almost overnight.
The result, according to a CBS News analysis of federal immigration court data: more than 75,500 asylum cases have received a motion to “pretermit” — meaning to terminate proceedings before a full hearing on the merits — on third-country removal grounds. The filings spiked dramatically after October 2025 and peaked at nearly 20,000 cases in a single month before ICE attorneys were directed in March 2026 to stop filing new motions. Cases already filed, however, continue.
About 12,300 people — roughly 16% of those whose cases were targeted — have already withdrawn or abandoned their asylum claims or agreed to voluntary departure. They did not lose their cases. They gave up because of what continuing cost them.
The Agreements Don’t Work. The Fear Does.
Here is the reality that the administration’s own numbers reveal: the third-country deportation strategy has produced far more fear than actual removals.
About 17,500 people have been deported to third countries since Trump returned to office, according to Third Country Deportation Watch. The vast majority were sent to Mexico. The number represents roughly 2% of total deportations under Trump’s second term.
Meanwhile, more than 24,000 people have received removal orders to third countries under the cooperative agreements — but the countries themselves have not agreed to accept most of them. Honduras, for example, has agreed to accept only 10 non-Honduran deportees per month. More than 6,300 non-Hondurans had deportation orders to Honduras by the end of March. As of late April, approximately 60 had actually been removed there.
“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,” said immigration attorney Adriana Heffley. “There are thousands of people now with deportation orders that cannot be carried out.”
What the strategy does accomplish is something more psychologically targeted: it makes asylum seekers fear that they could be sent anywhere, to countries they don’t know, with no functioning asylum system of their own. “Third-country deportations have more to do with fear than scale,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto of the Migration Policy Institute.
“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,” said immigration attorney Carlos Trujillo. “It’s the psychological warfare of trying to push you to just give up.”
Cases Stalled. Appeals Backlogged. People Held Indefinitely.
For those who do not give up, the situation is not much better. About 13,300 cases — more than half of those with third-country removal orders — are currently stalled on appeal. An appeal puts a pause on deportation, but it does not put a pause on detention.
The Board of Immigration Appeals, which makes final decisions on appeals, decided less than 1% of pending appeals by the end of March. Last year, the board took an average of two years to rule on a case appeal. For the roughly 1,800 people in detention with third-country removal orders, that wait happens behind bars — an average of about 10 months for those in custody, according to the data.
The result is a system in which a person can be held in detention for months or years, transferred between facilities thousands of miles from their family and attorney, and still face an uncertain outcome at the end of it. Many, like Yacelga, eventually decide that the certainty of deportation is preferable to the indefinite suffering of fighting.
“The third countries people are being removed to are often very dangerous countries themselves that don’t have a functioning asylum system,” said Victoria Neilson of the National Immigration Project. “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.”
What This Means If You Have an Asylum Case
If you are an asylum seeker currently in proceedings, the third-country removal strategy may affect your case directly — especially if you entered the United States after October 2025, or if your case received a motion to pretermit that you have not yet responded to.
There are several things worth understanding clearly.
A motion to pretermit is not a final order. It is a request by ICE to terminate your case without a full hearing. You have the right to oppose it, to argue that the country ICE wants to send you to is itself dangerous or lacks an adequate asylum system, and to appeal if the motion is granted.
Withdrawing your asylum case or agreeing to voluntary departure has serious long-term consequences. In many cases, it permanently bars you from reapplying for asylum and affects your ability to return to the United States legally. The pressure of detention is real — but the decision to withdraw should never be made without consulting an attorney first.
If you are in detention and have a third-country removal order, federal habeas corpus petitions have successfully challenged indefinite detention in cases like yours. As we reported this week, Powers Law Group recently secured the release of a client held for four and a half months without an individualized custody hearing — a constitutional violation that a federal court agreed to remedy.
The system is designed to be exhausting. The pressure is intentional. But giving up a valid legal claim without understanding your options is a decision that cannot easily be undone.
Powers Law Group Is Here
Powers Law Group represents asylum seekers across Texas who are facing removal proceedings, third-country deportation motions, prolonged detention, and appeals before the Board of Immigration Appeals. If your case has received a motion to pretermit, or if you or someone you know is in detention facing a third-country removal order, contact us today. Do not make the decision to withdraw or voluntarily depart without speaking with an attorney first.
Sources
- Julia Ingram, Thousands of Asylum-Seekers Abandon Their Cases as ICE Seeks to Deport Them to Nations They Aren’t From, CBS News, May 8, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com
- Third Country Deportation Watch (Refugees International / Human Rights First), Third-Country Removal Tracker, 2026. https://www.thirdcountrydeportationwatch.org
- Migration Policy Institute, Third-Country Asylum Agreements: Policy Analysis, 2026. https://www.migrationpolicy.org
- Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), Immigration Court Data — Asylum Cases Jan. 2025–March 2026. https://www.justice.gov/eoir
- National Immigration Project, Third-Country Removal and the Right to a Fair Asylum Hearing, 2026. https://www.nationalimmigrationproject.org
- American Immigration Council, Asylum Cooperative Agreements: What They Are and Why They Matter, 2025. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org
- Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Third-Country Removal Motions in US Immigration Courts, 2026. https://cgrs.uclawsf.edu
- ACLU, Your Rights in Immigration Court, 2025. https://www.aclu.org
- Powers Law Group, Four and a Half Months Detained. No Hearing. A Federal Court Said That Was Unconstitutional., May 2026. https://www.rubypowerslaw.com
- Powers Law Group, They Had Names: The 17 People Who Have Died in ICE Custody in 2026, April 2026. https://www.rubypowerslaw.com
