According to a new congressional investigation, the Trump administration spent over $1 million per person to deport some migrants to countries with which they had no connection, only to see many of them sent back to their countries of origin, at the taxpayers' expense.

A 30-page report by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released Thursday and published by The Guardian, details how the U.S. government paid more than $32 million to five foreign governments, including, according to the article, “some of the world’s most corrupt regimes,” to accept approximately 300 third-country nationals deported from the U.S.

In the most extreme case, the government paid US$7.5 million to Rwanda, plus an estimated US$601,864 in flight costs, to receive just seven people, about US$1.1 million per individual, according to the report's analysis of government spending data and flight records. There is another figure concerning Equatorial Guinea, where a payment of US$7.5 million represented a 275% increase over the highest annual amount previously granted to the country and exceeded the total US assistance it received in the previous eight years combined. The report highlights that the country ranks among the worst in the world in corruption indicators and raises concerns about the absence of independent audit mechanisms to track the use of resources.

Similarly, in El Salvador, which received at least US$4.76 million, the funds helped pay for the detention of more than 250 Venezuelans, many sent to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), where organizations such as Human Rights Watch documented consistent allegations of mistreatment and torture. According to the report, US authorities were also instructed, in some cases, not to directly monitor the conditions of deportees, relying instead on reports provided by the receiving governments themselves.

The document also describes negotiations with sensitive geopolitical implications. In the case of South Sudan, which accepted only eight deportees, local authorities reportedly requested relief from sanctions imposed on government officials, as well as American investment and support in the oil, gas, and mining sectors. As for Iran, the report points to the existence of confidential agreements involving the deportation of up to 400 Iranian citizens, including converts to Christianity, ethnic minorities, and political dissidents. In addition, "one man claims to have attempted suicide in a US detention center in an attempt to avoid being sent back to Iran, yet he was deported anyway."

Committee officials indicated that the State Department is seeking deportation agreements with 70 to 80 third countries. More than 80% of the migrants sent to these third countries have already returned to their countries of origin or are in the process of returning, the investigation found, raising the question of why they were not deported directly from the beginning.

“The Trump administration sometimes pays the country to receive people, flies them in, and then pays to bring them back to their countries of origin. It doesn’t make sense,” a sitting U.S. official told committee staff, according to the report, the first of its kind under Trump’s second term. “This is a scare tactic so they can tell people here in the U.S.: if you don’t deport voluntarily, you could be sent to South Sudan. You could be sent to Eswatini,” a committee member told the Guardian. “I really think that’s a determining factor, both for the pace and the way they’ve been conducting this.”

The practice has resulted in the U.S. government paying twice for the travel of some deportees. In one case, a Jamaican citizen was sent to Eswatini, a country in Southern Africa, at an estimated cost of over $181,000, only to be flown back to Jamaica on U.S.-funded flights weeks later. The Jamaican government has publicly stated that it “has not refused the return of any of its citizens,” contradicting the administration’s claims that third countries are only used when the governments of origin refuse to accept deportees back.

The government defended the deportations by claiming that it needs to send migrants to third countries when they are “so exceptionally barbaric that their own countries will not accept them back,” as the Department of Homeland Security wrote in a June press release. But the report documents multiple cases in which governments of origin were willing to accept their citizens or were never properly contacted. The report notes that, excluding El Salvador, only 51 people were redistributed among the remaining countries, which substantially raises the average cost per individual in those jurisdictions. Furthermore, court documents show that on several occasions, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not request travel documents from the countries of origin or did not give governments sufficient time to process the documentation. The president of Mexico stated that her government was never informed before the deportation of the Mexican citizen to South Sudan.

The document also identifies a lack of oversight of the millions of dollars sent to foreign governments, several of which have a proven history of corruption and human rights violations. Equatorial Guinea, mentioned earlier, ranks 172nd out of 182 countries in Transparency International's corruption ranking. The payment exceeds all American assistance provided to the country in the previous eight years.

Despite these warning signs, there is no evidence that the State Department is monitoring the use of the funds. The department appears to be relying on foreign governments themselves to report the expenditures, rather than resorting to independent auditors, who normally oversee American assistance.

According to the released data, the government also repatriated several leaders of the MS-13 gang who acted as US informants, undermining a long-running federal investigation. The investigation reveals that the government pursued these deals through obscure negotiations involving political concessions or pressure tactics.

Given the knowledge of these activities, there are concerns that the government may be using third countries to circumvent US immigration law. Since September 2025, most migrants sent to third countries had judicial protection issued by the US, meaning that the US could not legally send them back to their countries of origin due to the likelihood of facing persecution, torture, or death. However, within days of arriving in Ghana and Equatorial Guinea, many were deported.

A federal district judge, reviewing the deportations to Ghana, stated in September: “These actions also appear to be part of a pattern and a widespread effort to circumvent the government’s legal obligations, indirectly doing what it cannot do directly.” Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the leading Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in the report’s introduction: “At a time when the administration is already straining its relations with long-standing allies, it is building transactional relationships with corrupt and adversarial regimes—not around shared interests or strategic objectives, but rather around opaque agreements that serve neither American taxpayers nor American security.”

Asked about the specific conclusions of the report, a State Department spokesperson defended the government's approach: “Contrary to what you might have expected, this report only reinforces the unprecedented work the Trump administration has done to enforce our immigration laws,” said Tommy Pigott, senior deputy spokesperson for the department, in a statement.

Deportation agreements to third countries have already transferred more than $32 million to governments with a history of corruption and human rights violations, without adequate oversight or clear accountability mechanisms. According to the document, the lack of monitoring raises the risk that the United States is indirectly facilitating arbitrary detentions, torture, or other abuses, as well as circumventing immigration procedures and domestic legal restrictions.

The text argues that, even in the face of these problems, the State Department intends to rapidly expand this model, while the government revokes immigration protections such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and humanitarian parole, increasing the number of people potentially sent to countries with which it has no ties. According to the authors, this is an expensive, opaque, and legally questionable policy that prioritizes signaling political austerity at the expense of fiscal responsibility, security, and foreign policy coherence.

The report concludes by advocating for greater oversight by Congress and recommends that the government suspend these agreements until there is transparency, effective control of resources, and guarantees regarding the treatment of deportees.