The Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to renew the Trump administration’s third-country deportation program.
According to Solicitor General John Sauer, “Third-country removals require careful negotiation with foreign governments, which are rarely enthusiastic about accepting foreign citizens (especially criminals), and often requires obtaining travel documents and devoting significant manpower to the staging of flights to protect government officers and flight crews.”
Impeding on the program “imposes massive costs on the government” and invariably requires new rounds of diplomatic engagement with countries who may be all the more skeptical of our removal efforts given the disruption.”
“The United States relies on third countries in part to facilitate the removal of criminal aliens who are otherwise difficult to remove because their home countries and other countries refuse to take them,” Sauer argued. “Absent an effective third-country removal policy, the United States is forced to retain (and often release into the interior) vicious criminals who have already harmed our communities.”
Earlier this month, the First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously raised concerns on the third-country program. “We have some difficulty seeing how a receiving country can credibly provide blanket assurances that all removed noncitizens will not be persecuted or tortured there unless it intends to provide them with some sort of affirmative protection against rogue agents and non-state actors,” Circuit Judge Seth Aframe wrote.
Then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem issued the third-country policy in March 2025. Discussing concerns that the illegal immigrant would express fear or be persecuted in the third country, Noem wrote, “In cases where the alien affirmatively states a fear, USCIS will generally screen the alien within 24 hours of referral from the immigration officer. This screening may be done remotely. USCIS will determine whether the alien would more likely than not be persecuted on a statutorily protected ground or tortured in the country of removal. If USCIS determines that the alien has not met this standard, the alien will be removed.”
