Geopolitics of cruelty: US expands third-country deportation

Guest post by Carina Trabalón and Amalia Campos-Delgado. Carina is member of the research programme on Critical Latin American Studies on Migration and Borders at the Center for Advanced Studies of the National University of Córdoba. She holds a PhD in Latin American Social Studies, National University of Córdoba, Argentina. Her research interests include border regimes, migration governance, racialisation, transit migration, deportation, border externalisation, and the Americas.

Amalia is Assistant Professor of Law & Society at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society, Leiden University. She holds a PhD in Politics from Queen’s University Belfast and is member of the Mexican National System of Researchers -SNII, Level 1. Her research interests include border securitisation, externalisation of borders, migration-control bureaucracies, and migrant care work.

The deportations of migrants from the US to third countries, irrespective of their national, cultural, linguistic, or religious background, has fundamentally reconfigured the geopolitics of deportation. As documented by Human Rights Watch, by June 2026, the US had signed 34 agreements mostly with countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. These agreements are not governed by a standardised regulatory framework. Instead, the dates, size, and age, nationality, and gender composition of deportation flights are bilaterally negotiated between the US and the third country on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, they all share the same approach: third countries receive charter flights carrying non-national migrants deported from the US and, with US financial support, those countries activate their own political-legal mechanisms to manage the migrants’ im/mobility. They are then expected to facilitate the migrants’ transfer to their ‘countries of origin’, designated as the final destinations. However, as explored later, this does not always unfold linearly. These forced displacements reveal both the creation and expansion of a US ‘carceral circuit’ among diverse countries of the Global South. They also demonstrate the use of indeterminacy and uncertainty in deportation trajectories to exercise disciplinary power, since any migrant who enters or resides in the US could be detained and deported to any country in the Global South.

Our recent article, Liminal Deportations: the politics of third-country deportation in the Americas, draws on the cases of Costa Rica and Panama in 2025. In it, we problematise these deportations, demonstrating how they combine the externalisation of borders, secrecy, border spectacularity, confinement regimes, and the power asymmetry between nations. These cases are paradigmatic, not only because of their geopolitical significance in the regional architecture of containment and deterrence, but also because their development reveals analytically rich processes unfolding across extended spatial and temporal frames. In these countries that are neither the migrants’ intended ‘destination’ nor their ‘country of origin’, we identify the incorporation of intermediary spaces and actors, as well as the emergence of ontologies of resistance. We have also documented the formation of new, and sometimes multiple, post-deportation scenarios, in which deported migrants are detained, continue along the deportation pathway toward their presumed countries of origin, remain in precarious legal situations, or escape to alternative destinations.

Drawing on the notion of liminality, which has also provided a productive conceptual lens for migration scholars, we develop the notion of ‘liminal deportations’ to illuminate how countries acting as “intermediaries” in deportation chains are neither countries of origin, nor full destinations. Rather, they are in-between spaces where extra-ordinary legal, administrative, and mobility protocols are applied. Through this notion we problematise the in-between realities produced in deportee-admitting countries, by questioning how these agreements generate transitory – territorial, experiential, and legal – spaces.

Systemic cruelty and the (new) legalities of confinement

Third-country deportation is a fragmented yet systematic process that exploits a pre-existing deportation architecture, endowing it with a new symbolic, material and operational character. It involves border control modalities and tactics that multiply and revitalise the involvement of intermediary actors, reinvent the ontologies of resistance, and generate unique post-deportation scenarios. In its implementation, the violent practice of deportation branches out to geographically distant, spatially dispersed locations with which the deported person has no prior links. This happens after the US determines that migrants cannot be ‘transferred’ to their ‘countries of origin’. We argue that it reflects a geopolitical reconfiguration that aggressively mobilises political-economic power asymmetries between nations, weaponises forced mobility, reorganises confinement regimes, and capitalises on the technologies of migration governance.

Yet third-country deportation is not an isolated deportation technology. As a neo-colonial practice, it moves in lockstep with the pace and direction of other initiatives that – within the framework of the internationalisation of the right-wing – champion border externalisation. On one side sits the new ‘Shield of the Americas’ alliance led by the US in defence of ‘hemispheric security’ established in March 2026. On the other, the ‘Return Hub’ policy in Europe, approved also in March 2026 and framed within the ‘Migration and Asylum Pact’, that came into effect on June 12 2026. It is noteworthy that international organisations are seeking to capitalise on the mass deportation plans in both scenarios, and openly welcome the agreements. 

In Europe, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) expressed in an official communication in March 2025, “IOM notes that the proposal also lays the basis for external solutions such as return hubs. The Organisation stands ready to advise and assist States in the design and operationalisation of innovative return policy that is both effective and in line with European and international law”. In the Latin American context, IOM involvement in US ‘return migration’ has been less subtle. In February 2025, IOM welcomed “the United States’ commitment to resuming life-saving humanitarian activities” and acknowledged the “rising demand for return assistance across Latin America and the Caribbean.” They also reaffirmed the legitimacy and financial centrality of its partnership with the US: “With decades of experience partnering with governments – including the United States as a founding member and its largest donor – IOM remains dedicated to addressing migration challenges through effective, principled, and needs-driven solutions. IOM looks forward to deepening its collaboration with the United States in the months and years ahead”.

Indeed, the IOM, as examined in our article, plays a decisive role in the implementation and legitimisation of this “technology of deportation”. Its validating and organisational presence emerges at various stages, notably in the administration of US funds in third countries and the coercive use of Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programmes that, through new stages of travel and transfer, seek to ensure the continuity of deportation processes to ‘countries of origin’. In other words, diplomatic agreements politically produce new relations of racial mobility and immobility that become viable, executable, repeatable, and, at least initially, legitimate, thanks to the IOM’s involvement in the deportation process.

Beyond contingency: liminal deportations

We argue that these are not fleeting and contingent practices, but processes that are protracted in time and fragmented in space, crucial to the US deportation machine. We claim that the implementation of third-country deportation has transformed deportee-admitting territories into liminal spaces, where ‘extra-ordinary’ migration management protocols are activated, reconfiguring politics, spatialities, and temporalities. We introduce the concept of ‘liminal deportations’ to problematise the formation of transitory, territorial, experiential, and legal, spaces. Liminal deportations reveal new geopolitical dynamics within contemporary punitive regimes of deportation.

We identify that third-country deportation seeks to establish and normalise the existence of new North–South–South racial deportation circuits. This involves heterogeneous trajectories that always begin in the US and are oriented, first, to a third country and then potentially to the country of origin, both generally located in the Global South. In these geopolitical processes, we observe the convergence of practices that (only on the surface) appear contradictory. On the one hand, the diplomacy of deportation becomes indispensable, whilst at the same time it seems to be diluted within extremely asymmetrical inter-state relations. On the other hand, technical racism renews its system of ideas through the entrepreneurial drive of international organisations serving the most hostile forms of punitive justice. Indeed, a key element of third-country deportation politics is the instrumentalisation of global migration governance structures. 

As the list of countries willing to negotiate with the US to host third-country nationals grows, we are also witnessing the expansion of a geopolitical framework that weaponises border externalisation as a yet more direct form of punishment against migrant populations, in a sort of diversified cruelty. Undoubtedly, the current reality of methodical repression, normalised arbitrariness, and institutionalised persecution amplifies and enables the foundations, meanings, imaginaries, and interests that make the imposition of increasingly institutionalised forms of cruelty possible. We therefore view with great concern and indignation the proliferation of the ways in which racial violence is exercised, narrated, and reinvented through deportation within frameworks of intensified criminalisation and securitisation of migration, which appear to have not only no limits, but also no constraints.