Miller pays foreign autocrats to take banished refugees

By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso · September 21, 2026

The Trump administration trades human bodies to foreign autocrats for political deals, stripping refugees of legal protections in a cruel assault on basic human dignity.

A $410 million machine built to trade human beings

Policy always lands somewhere. This time it lands on Nika, an Iranian woman who held withholding of removal. ICE shackled her and put her on a flight to the Central African Republic. She did not choose this, and she had never heard of the place. "They never told me they were going to deport me [to] this country," Nika told theguardian.com. "I don’t know anything about Africa."

This is where the paper promises of immigration hardliners dissolve into cruelty. The Trump administration has pledged at least $410m to secure deportation agreements across the globe. It turned the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration into a broker for forced expulsions. Reporting from theguardian.com, The Washington Post, France 24, Forbidden Stories, Asharq Al-Awsat, and RFI English reveals a sprawling, confidential network. This machine has already banished more than 25,000 people to lands that are not their own. Officers bussed thousands to Mexico and forced thousands more onto planes to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and central Asia.

The architects of this cruelty sit in Washington, hiding behind bureaucratic restructuring and cash sweeteners. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, leads Trump's deportation drive. At the State Department, Christian Ehrhardt heads the newly formed Office of Remigration. This division secures third-country deportation agreements across Africa. Ehrhardt traveled through the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Togo, and Gabon to press autocrats for deals. An unnamed U.S. official noted that foreign leaders treat Ehrhardt as a White House envoy and roll out the red carpet. The administration authorized millions in direct payments to foreign governments and international agencies to grease the wheels. As an unnamed former official observed, the administration wanted fast money with no strings attached to bypass congressional notification.

Bypassing statutory safeguards to dump families in unfamiliar danger

Defenders of this machinery claim these expulsions are merely practical responses to uncooperative home countries. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, defends the outcome: "This is a way to remove people who should be removed. The country of citizenship is responsible for their own citizens. I’m not saying it’s a great outcome for folks, but that’s the way it is." White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis echoes this stance. She claims the only people sent to third countries are dangerous criminals or those who refuse removal home.

That defense collapses under the weight of the facts. Immigration lawyers Alma David and Erica Reilly point out that most people shipped to African nations have no criminal record. Many possess legal protections, including withholding of removal or Convention Against Torture status. This is not about public safety. It is about exhaustion and deterrence. As Reilly explained, the administration does everything it can to make the alternative terrifying so people leave on their own.

Consider Rabbiatu Kuyateh, a nurse who spent most of her life in the U.S. ICE arrested her during a routine appointment in Baltimore, Maryland. Officers held her in detention before deporting her to Ghana, where guards dragged her onto a flight to Sierra Leone. "Ghana? I’m not from Ghana; what am I going to do there? I only saw Ghana on the map; I don’t know where that is," she told France 24. Her son, Mohamed, watched her vanish into the system. Then there is Soraya, a Ghanaian woman who fled persecution and held withholding of removal status. The administration deported her to Cameroon, a country hostile to LGBT people.

These actions mirror Remain in Mexico (2018-2019), which used third-party countries to circumvent asylum laws and shift the burden of processing refugees to a third party. Just as the UK-Rwanda asylum plan (2022-2023) used payment to third countries to receive asylum seekers, treating human beings as bargaining chips for deterrence, this administration trades human cargo for foreign compliance. As immigration attorney Tin Nguyen bluntly put it: "Human bodies are being pawned off and traded in order to get concessions from the U.S. government."

A lawless deportation machine that treats human bodies as currency

Under the Third-country deportation policy (2025), the continuous expansion of the deportation machine bypasses domestic protections by treating human bodies as bargaining chips traded with autocrats. This mechanism drives every flight tracked by the Deportation Project, a joint investigation coordinated by Paris-based Forbidden Stories with the Guardian and other media organisations. Consortium reporters tracked flights carrying migrants and asylum seekers to dozens of countries.

These transfers violate international law against refoulement by returning refugees to places where they face persecution, torture, or death. Michael Garcia Bocheneck of Human Rights Watch noted that the government uses third-country removals to evade international responsibilities, creating an indirect form of return to harm.

Even when federal courts intervene, the machine rolls forward. A U.S. federal appeals court ruled that third-country removals are unlawful because removing people without time to challenge the transfer violates due process. Yet James Percival, DHS General Counsel, shrugged off the ruling and insisted that claiming fear gives DHS the right to send people elsewhere.

This is an unsparing moral failure engineered by officials like Stephen Miller and Christian Ehrhardt. When lawyers like Sahar Jalili beg immigration officers for time to save a client from an unlawful flight, they meet stone-cold silence. When women in detention drink bleach because they dread banishment to strange lands, remigration architects count it as success. This clandestine network represents a direct assault on human dignity and international law. Justice requires that the public unmask these secret agreements, that courts halt agencies operating with impunity, and that the United States immediately stop banishing refugees to alien lands.

Miller pays foreign autocrats to take banished refugees

A $410 million machine built to trade human beings

Bypassing statutory safeguards to dump families in unfamiliar danger

A lawless deportation machine that treats human bodies as currency

Sources