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. The documents, which have not been previously reported, provide the most comprehensive picture to date of the Trump administration’s fast-growing third-country network.

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.” This official, like many others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal State Department operations.

What countries get in return under these agreements varies significantly. The documents from inside the Office of Remigration reviewed by The Post show financial commitments that include $81 million in direct payments to 13 of the foreign governments. While that overall sum is small in terms of the U.S. budget, it often represents a massive expansion in funds being sent to authoritarian regimes that previously received smaller amounts from the United States. The deals were written through contracts designed to bypass statutory requirements, including human rights safeguards, that come with most foreign assistance spending, according to people familiar with the agreements.

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.

The administration also has pledged grants totaling $179 million to the International Organization for Migration and $124 million to the U.N. Refugee Agency for refugee- and infrastructure-related projects in the third countries. Those organizations are not directly party to the deals, but that money has been negotiated by the foreign governments in connection to their deportation agreements, according to the government documents and people familiar with the deals. These payments have largely replaced voluntary contributions the U.S. government traditionally made to the global aid organizations and are used as “sweeteners” to get foreign countries to accept the third-country deportees, people familiar with the deals said.

Other documents showed the administration was in negotiations to pay millions more in potential deals with some of the countries Ehrhardt visited in June.

The deals also vary widely in size and scope, with foreign governments setting a range of conditions, according to the internal State Department documents. For example, Uganda will only take African nationals, while neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo has dictated the opposite, as it won’t accept anyone from Africa. Several countries, including the Central African Republic and Eswatini, have agreed to take violent criminals, but others such as Ghana and Sierra Leone only permit nonviolent offenders.

The through line, according to current and former State Department staffers, is that the administration is locking in the agreements as quickly as possible. Despite mounting costs and complexities, they said, the contracts require minimal oversight over how the money is spent and how the migrants are treated, even though some of the third countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes.

The State Department’s own human rights reports — intended as a tool to prevent foreign assistance from going to repressive governments — include accounts of serious abuses in several of the countries. Last year, for example, U.S. diplomats reported that torture had occurred in every prison in Equatorial Guinea and that government forces in Cameroon had killed unarmed civilians. The 2024 report on Gabon, which remains in negotiations with the U.S. following Ehrhardt’s visit in June, includes details of torture and indefinite detention.

Migrants whom the Trump administration has deported to third countries have alleged, in interviews and legal complaints, that they have been subjected to inhumane conditions — beaten by armed guards, denied food and prohibited from communicating with lawyers or their families.

What the Trump administration wanted “was fast money, with no strings attached,” said one former official who left the State Department over objections to the policy. “The whole point was to circumvent [congressional] notification that money was being sent to a government known to be corrupt.”

The Washington Post examined the Office of Remigration as part of The Deportation Project, a joint investigation into third-country removals conducted over six months by 26 media organizations in 15 countries, organized by Forbidden Stories, a nonprofit news organization based in Paris. Journalists interviewed dozens of former and current U.S. government officials, foreign leaders and immigration attorneys, reporting in seven of the third countries and speaking to 35 third-country nationals who were deported from the U.S.

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.

“The Trump administration is well aware of the legal arguments against this policy, but they’re storming forward anyway,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, a co-counsel for the plaintiffs.

The State Department did not answer detailed questions from The Post and other partners in the project, but it said in a statement the U.S. government would use “all legal means to remove those with no right to remain in our country.”

Separately, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott pointed blame toward the Biden administration, which he said had led to “millions of illegal aliens” crossing the border while “millions more abused ‘legal’ pathways.”

“The result was crime, destabilization of communities, and the rise of transnational criminal organizations terrorizing Americans across the country,” Pigott said.

Lauren Bis, a White House spokeswoman, said that the “only illegal aliens going to third countries are those whose home countries won’t accept them including dangerous criminals or illegal aliens with orders of removal who have asked to not be removed to their home country.”

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.

That is but a fraction of the 985,000 deportations that the Department of Homeland Security says it has carried out in Trump’s second term. But the policy has another significant impact: spreading fear and a deterrent message that migrants are better off returning home rather than risk being sent to an unknown location.

“We have changed the orientation of the bureau completely,” said Andrew Veprek, Ehrhardt’s boss and a Miller ally who spoke in April at the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank. Veprek was recently promoted at the State Department to oversee all U.S. foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs.

The PRM, the bureau that oversees the remigration office, had been a “humanitarian assistance” office with a budget of about $4 billion a year that “focused on bringing people to the United States,” he said. “Now, we are focused on implementing the president’s immigration agenda.”