Payments to Other Governments, and the Safeguards That Should Come With Them

The United States has committed tens of millions of dollars to foreign governments that agree to accept people it removes. Some of the promises to protect the people sent are written in memoranda that disclaim legal effect; others are one-sided assurances; most are made by governments already bound by the Convention Against Torture. What the public record does not show is any regular means of checking that the promises are kept.

Removal to a third country costs money. Flights must be chartered, governments persuaded, and, in a growing number of cases, paid. In February 2026 nine Democratic senators released a minority staff report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, commissioned by its ranking member, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), which states that the administration “has provided more than $32 million directly to five countries” in connection with agreements to accept people who are not their nationals, and that the total costs of third-country removals through January 2026 “are unknown but are likely upward of $40 million.” (At What Cost? Inside the Trump Administration’s Secret Deportation Deals, at 6; release.)

The sums are modest by the standards of federal spending. The questions they raise are not. Some of the people moved under these arrangements are people the United States has itself found likely to be persecuted or tortured in the country they came from. This part examines what was committed, what the governments that accepted the money undertook, what happened to the people sent, and the safeguards that payment of this kind should carry. It is the Coalition’s view that the difficulty lies less in the fact of payment than in the absence of conditions attached to it.

The report calls itself a minority report and is the work of the committee’s Democratic staff, not a finding of the committee; it is cited here as such. Its figures rest on the agreements themselves, a court exhibit, federal award data, press reports, and staff meetings with American and foreign officials (at 6 n.3). Where the Coalition has checked a figure independently, it says so below.

The payments

The report identifies five governments paid directly. Its figures as of 31 January 2026, and its estimate of the cost per person when the payment and the identified flight costs are spread across the people actually received by then, are these (at 8):

• Equatorial Guinea: $7.5 million; 29 people received; about $282,000 per person.
• Rwanda: $7.5 million; 7 people received; about $1.1 million per person.
• Palau: $7.5 million; no one received; no flights.
• Eswatini: $5.1 million; 15 people received; about $413,000 per person.
• El Salvador: $4.76 million; about 250 people received; about $21,000 per person.

The five figures total $32.36 million. Arrivals have continued since January, so the cost per person has fallen: Third Country Deportation Watch now records 63 people sent to Equatorial Guinea, Palau has received three, and a lawyer’s sworn declaration describes a transfer to Eswatini in October 2026, as the Coalition’s country guides set out. The report adds that “[m]uch of the funds were provided as lump sum payments, often before any third country nationals arrived” (at 6), that the State Department provided the money directly to the governments “rather than through trusted third-party implementing partners who conduct regular monitoring and oversight,” and that it appears to rely “on the foreign governments themselves” to report on how the money is used (at 15).

Federal award records, which the Coalition read on 8 November 2026, show three grants of this kind obligated: $7,500,000 to Equatorial Guinea, signed on 29 October 2025; $7,500,000 to Palau, signed on 29 December 2025; and $5,000,000 to Liberia, described as funding for “migration management activities and building capacity for the Republic of Liberia,” signed on 21 January 2026. None of the three records an outlay against it. (USAspending.gov, awards SPRMCO26GR0010, SPRMCO26GR0022 and SPRMCO26GR0037.) Liberia’s government, for its part, has said that it has not demanded or received any compensation for its consent, as the Coalition’s Liberia guide records. The award searches have limits: they found no grant comparable to the reported payments to Rwanda, Eswatini or El Salvador, which the report sources to the agreements and to other records.

The Equatorial Guinea and Palau grants are described as meeting each country’s “humanitarian and migration-related needs to be used for ‘assistance to or on behalf of refugees,’” and all three are recorded under the State Department’s overseas refugee assistance programs. That wording tracks the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, which authorizes appropriations “for assistance to or on behalf of refugees who are outside the United States designated by the President,” and authorizes grants to any “government or government agency, whether within or without the United States” (22 U.S.C. § 2601(b)(2); § 2602(a)(1)). The Coalition has not located a published presidential designation for these grants. Senator Shaheen wrote to the Secretary of State in November 2025 that the payment to Equatorial Guinea “used funding from the Migration and Refugee Assistance account making this the first ever government-to-government transfer of such funds, which are intended to respond to global refugee and humanitarian crises,” and that, “with the exception of limited medical supplies, prior U.S. foreign assistance was provided only to trusted and vetted implementing partners, such as nongovernmental organizations or the United Nations” (letter, as released). The Associated Press reported that the State Department declined to confirm the details, as the Coalition’s Equatorial Guinea guide records; the report states that, as of February 2026, the Department had not responded to the letter (at 17).

What the money was for, on paper

The instruments under which these payments were made are now largely public: the State Department has released them, and the Coalition keeps copies of each. Two of them state an amount.

• Under its memorandum with Rwanda, signed in June 2025, the United States would “[p]rovide Rwanda with an upfront disbursement of USD 7,500,000 to strengthen Rwanda’s border and migration management capacity,” and Rwanda would facilitate the removal of “up to 250” people (the Coalition’s copy).
• Under its memorandum with Eswatini, signed in May 2025, the United States would “[p]rovide Eswatini with USD 5,100,000 to build its border and migration management capacity,” and Eswatini would facilitate the removal of “up to 160” people (the Coalition’s copy).
• Palau’s memorandum, signed on 24 December 2025, records that the two governments “intend to discuss the potential provision of financial assistance” to help Palau “with the costs associated with the reception of any individuals transferred”; the grant of $7.5 million was signed five days later (the Coalition’s copy).
• For El Salvador, the report describes the $4.76 million as provided “in connection with the detention of more than 250 Venezuelans deported from the United States to be used for associated detention costs,” under a separate agreement (at 18). In the exchange of notes of March 2025, the United States asked El Salvador to accept “up to 500 Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) members”; El Salvador expressed its readiness “to accommodate approximately 300” and confirmed that it would “house these individuals for one (1) year, pending further decisions on their long-term disposition” (the Coalition’s copy).

The same instruments describe the protection of the people sent in varied terms. Rwanda and Eswatini each undertake to “[a]ct in accordance with” their national laws and international obligations, “including prevention of refoulement and access to asylum and protection systems.” Rwanda also undertakes to “[p]rovide appropriate legal status or other legal accommodations under Rwandan law” to the people it accepts, and the Eswatini memorandum provides for the International Organization for Migration or another provider to assist with “the further relocation, within one year of arrival,” of the people sent there. Equatorial Guinea’s note of 2 October 2025, like Ghana’s of 1 August 2025, assures the United States that people transferred will not be subjected to persecution or torture “in Equatorial Guinea or in any other country to which the Government of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea may subsequently transfer them” (the Coalition’s copy). El Salvador assured the United States that the reception of the people sent would be “conducted in accordance with Salvadoran law and international obligations, including adherence to the Convention Against Torture,” and the United States, in a later note, “highlights the importance” of that assurance. Palau assures that “it would not persecute or torture” anyone transferred, and that any later deportation would respect “the principle of nonrefoulement”; its memorandum also records that the United States intends to give Palau each person’s immigration information, “including all countries from which the individual was granted withholding of removal.”

Three of the instruments, the memoranda with Rwanda, Eswatini and Palau, then disclaim legal effect. “Nothing in this Memorandum creates any rights or obligations under Rwandan law, U.S. law, or international law.” “Nothing in this Memorandum creates any rights or obligations under Eswatini law, U.S. law, or international law.” “Nothing in this MOU is intended to create any rights or obligations under international or domestic law, including with respect to the disbursement or obligation of funds.” Those disclaimers apply to the money and the protection alike. The notes from Equatorial Guinea, Ghana and El Salvador contain no such disclaimer and are framed as assurances. And the disclaimers do not change the governments’ own obligations: every one of these governments except Palau, which has signed the Convention but not ratified it, is a party to the Convention Against Torture (depositary record), and is bound by it whatever an instrument says. The gap lies elsewhere. The financial commitments appear in federal award data; the protective commitments have no comparable public record of verification.

Liberia’s arrangement takes a different form. The United States and Liberia concluded it as a binding agreement by exchange of notes in September 2025, published in the State Department’s treaty series, under which Liberia “agrees not to return any person transferred to Liberia by the Government of the United States of America to their home country or country of former habitual residence until a final decision has been made regarding any pending protection claims” (TIAS 25-910, the Coalition’s copy). Its limits are part of the picture. The undertaking lasts until protection claims are decided; disputes are to be resolved “through dialogue or diplomatic channels”; and “[e]ither Party may terminate or suspend this Agreement at any time.” The text of a separate arrangement reported for a Liberian flight of August 2026 has not been published. Whether the undertaking has been honored is a question the Coalition follows in its Liberia guide.

What happened to the people sent

The report’s summary finding is that “[a]s of January 2026, more than eighty percent of the migrants sent to third countries paid by the United States to take them in have already returned to their country of origin or are in the process of doing so” (at 5). Most of that figure is one group. Of the roughly 300 people received by the five governments, “approximately 250 were Venezuelans sent to El Salvador in March 2025; the total number of third country nationals received by the other four countries was just 51” (at 7), and the report’s sources for the returns include reporting on the prisoner exchange of July 2025 in which Venezuelans held in El Salvador were sent home (at 7 n.9). For some people return home may have been lawful and even welcome. For people the United States had protected against return, it is the outcome the protection was meant to prevent.

• Equatorial Guinea. The report records that, according to advocates, all twenty-nine people sent there by January 2026 held protection from American courts against return home, that they say they were discouraged from seeking asylum and then told they would be sent back, and that “at least eight individuals have been sent to their country of origin” (at 28). The Coalition has followed their case before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
• Eswatini. Human Rights Watch reports that the men in the first groups were placed in a maximum-security prison, that lawyers were refused access to them, and that the High Court ordered access, an order the Supreme Court of Eswatini upheld; it also records the government spokesperson’s statement that the men were “on transit and will be repatriated to their respective countries” (To Scare People). In a declaration filed in federal court in Boston on 4 November 2026, a lawyer states that a client protected against return to Liberia was flown to Eswatini in October 2026 and, on arrival, “was asked if he wanted to be repatriated to Liberia, where a U.S. immigration judge had already found he would be tortured” (Declaration of Lilah R. Thompson ¶ 14).
• El Salvador. The people sent in 2025 were held in the country’s maximum-security prison, where, the report says, “there are credible reports detainees were tortured” (at 18), citing a Human Rights Watch report of November 2025 (“You Have Arrived in Hell”).

Monitoring

The report’s most consequential finding concerns oversight. The State Department, it says, “is not tracking foreign government compliance with diplomatic assurances or enforcing agreement terms, even where evidence suggests foreign governments are violating their commitments,” and that “[i]n at least one country, U.S. officials told Committee Minority staff that Trump Administration officials instructed them not to follow up” on how the people sent there were being treated (at 5). The report records the government’s answer in the words of Cart Weiland, the State Department official it describes as responsible for signing off on the payment to El Salvador, who testified at his nomination hearing in December 2025 that El Salvador “is under strict obligations to report on how they’re using those funds” (at 15 n.43). The report also records his statement that “the agreement has a provision that explicitly mandates adherence to international human rights treaties and conventions” (at 20).

There is some record of follow-up. Human Rights First reported in October 2026 that two State Department officials visited the airport, hotel and medical facilities in Equatorial Guinea in 2026, after media attention to the treatment of the people sent there, but that “the officials did not speak directly with the individuals about their treatment or conditions” (“In the Middle of the Night, They Come and Get You”). United Nations experts and the courts of Eswatini have asked their own questions, as the Coalition’s guides record. The point is not that no one has asked. It is that a provision mandating adherence to human rights treaties is a promise, whether it is kept is a question of fact, and the State Department, which the report notes is responsible for assessing whether a foreign government’s assurances are “credible” (at 19), has published no account the Coalition has found of how it checks. The Coalition does not suggest that monitoring would be simple, or that every government concerned would welcome it. It notes that the people whose safety is at stake are, in many cases, people the United States has already found to be at risk.

Ghana: an arrangement without payment

Not every arrangement involves money, and the record should not be read as if it did. Ghana’s Foreign Minister said in September 2025 that Ghana “has not received and does not seek any financial compensation or material benefit” (Ghana News Agency). The Senate report does not list Ghana among the governments paid, and the federal award searches returned no grant to Ghana comparable to those made to Equatorial Guinea, Palau or Liberia, although, as noted above, those searches have limits. Human Rights Watch records President Mahama’s suggestion that Ghana hoped the arrangement would help reverse American visa restrictions and tariffs, and that the United States lifted the visa restrictions on 26 September 2025 and rescinded the tariffs on 13 November 2025 (To Scare People). Ghana has said the arrangement was humanitarian.

Ghana is also where the most extensive record of onward removal has been assembled, as Part 4 sets out. The lesson cuts both ways. Payment does not prove that a government will send protected people home, and its absence does not prove that it will not. The safeguards that matter are the same in either case.

The government’s case for the arrangements

The government’s case for third-country removal is set out most fully in its Supreme Court brief, which defends the Department of Homeland Security’s guidance on such removals rather than the payments as such. It explains that the United States “is often unable to remove aliens to their home countries,” either because they hold protection there or because those countries refuse to accept them, “including that many of them have serious criminal histories,” and that such people were often released as a result; that “finding a willing country often entails delicate diplomatic negotiations”; and that the policy “fixes those longstanding failures, while also accounting for our humanitarian obligations” (Brief for the Petitioners at 2-3, Dep’t of Homeland Sec. v. D.V.D., No. 26-426). On 29 September 2026 the Supreme Court stayed the judgment against that guidance and agreed to decide the case; argument is set for 9 December 2026 (docket). The payments themselves rest on the statutory authority described above, and the report records other assistance tied to cooperation on removals, including $9.5 million to Costa Rica (at 24).

Those points deserve weight. They support the conclusion that payment can be legitimate, and that persuading another government to accept people may require it. They do not support the conclusion that payment should be detached from the protective assurances. A government that pays another to accept people it has found to be at risk of persecution or torture assumes, at the least, a responsibility to know what happens to them.

The safeguards that should come with payment

The sources reviewed here, read together, point to a short list of conditions. None is novel, and several are already found in one or another of the instruments the United States has signed.

• Binding terms. Protective commitments should be made in a form that binds, as Liberia’s were, rather than in memoranda that disclaim legal effect, and should not be terminable at will while people protected under them remain in the country.
• A specific undertaking against onward removal. The government that accepts a person should agree, as Liberia did, not to return anyone to the country of origin while a protection claim is pending, and, as Ghana and Equatorial Guinea assured, not to transfer anyone to a country where the person faces persecution or torture.
• Disclosure of protection status, with consent. A government cannot honor an undertaking about people it cannot identify. Palau’s memorandum already contemplates telling it which countries a person is protected against. Because the confidentiality regulations forbid disclosing a protection claim without the applicant’s written consent, as Part 6 explains, that information should pass with the person’s consent and no further than the undertaking requires.
• Independent access and monitoring. Lawyers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and other independent monitors should have access to the people transferred. Human Rights Watch recommends that the State Department “[r]egularly monitor the conditions and treatment of individuals already transferred to third countries to ensure that the agreed standards of third-country agreements are consistently met in practice.”
• Disbursement tied to compliance. Funds should be released in stages, against reporting, with suspension when an assurance is broken, rather than in a lump sum in advance.
• A remedy. When a government sends a protected person toward the country he or she is protected against without a fair consideration of the claim, the United States should act to bring the person back. Human Rights Watch recommends parole back to the United States in those circumstances. In Osahon v. Mullin, No. 2:26-cv-09121 (C.D. Cal.), a federal court ordered the government to take “all reasonable respondent-controlled measures” to facilitate one such person’s return, including parole “if warranted” (ECF No. 19, at 4); the government arranged his parole, and he returned to Los Angeles in October 2026.
• Reporting to Congress and the public. The Case-Zablocki Act already requires the Secretary of State to send Congress, each month, the text of international agreements and qualifying non-binding instruments and the legal authority for each (1 U.S.C. § 112b(a)(1)). What it does not require is an account of the amounts paid, the people sent and what became of them, and that is what the committees that appropriate and oversee the funds most need. The African Commission has called on African States “to make public any existing or proposed agreements with non-African States concerning the reception or detention of migrants, asylum seekers, or refugees” (Resolution 645, ¶ 2).

Conclusion: the terms matter more than the price

It is easy to measure these arrangements in dollars per person, and the figures invite comment. The more important measure is what the money secured for the people it moved. On the public record, it secured their admission to another country and little else that can be verified. The promises of protection were real promises, made by sovereign governments, and some may have been kept. Some were written as intentions in memoranda that disclaim legal effect; others were made as assurances; most were made by governments already bound by the Convention. None is matched by a published means of checking it.

The United States may pay another government to help administer a lawful arrangement. The obligation not to send people to persecution or torture does not change with the price, and it is not discharged by a promise that no one checks. Where payment and protection travel together, the protection should be the part that is binding, and the part that is verified.

Authorities and references

• Congress: S. Comm. on Foreign Rels., Minority Staff Report, At What Cost? Inside the Trump Administration’s Secret Deportation Deals (Feb. 2026), at 5-8, 15, 17-20, 24, 28 (report; release); Letter from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen to Secretary of State Marco Rubio (Nov. 10, 2025) (text, as released).
• Statutes: 22 U.S.C. §§ 2601(b)(2), 2602(a)(1) (§ 2601; § 2602); 1 U.S.C. § 112b (text).
• Federal award records: USAspending.gov, awards SPRMCO26GR0010 (Equatorial Guinea) (record), SPRMCO26GR0022 (Palau) (record), SPRMCO26GR0037 (Liberia) (record), read on 8 November 2026.
• Instruments, as released by the State Department (the Coalition’s copies): Rwanda, memorandum of understanding (June 2025), file 2025-0028QN (PDF); Eswatini, memorandum (May 2025), file 63960 (PDF); Palau, memorandum of understanding (Dec. 24, 2025), file 2026-0010QN (PDF); El Salvador, exchange of notes (Mar. 2025), file 25-0001CQN (PDF); Equatorial Guinea, note verbale (Oct. 2, 2025), file 2026-0031QN (PDF); Ghana, diplomatic note (Aug. 1, 2025), file 64047 (PDF); Liberia, agreement effected by exchange of notes (Sept. 2025), TIAS 25-910 (PDF). State Department FOIA Library (releases).
• Court records: Brief for the Petitioners at 2-3, Dep’t of Homeland Sec. v. D.V.D., No. 26-426 (U.S. Oct. 23, 2026) (brief; docket); Declaration of Lilah R. Thompson ¶ 14 (executed Oct. 23, 2026), Greater Boston Legal Services v. Mullin, No. 1:26-cv-14869 (D. Mass.), ECF No. 37-4 (filed Nov. 4, 2026) (declaration); Osahon v. Mullin, No. 2:26-cv-09121 (C.D. Cal.), preliminary injunction of Sept. 10, 2026, ECF No. 19 (order), and later orders (docket).
• Governments of Ghana and Liberia: Ghana News Agency, report of the Foreign Minister’s remarks at the Government Accountability Series, September 2025 (report); Liberia, Ministry of Information, statement of Aug. 18, 2026 (statement).
• Regional and monitoring: African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, ACHPR/Res.645 (LXXXV) 2025 (Oct. 30, 2025) (resolution); Human Rights Watch, “To Scare People”: US Expulsions of Third-Country Nationals to Countries in Africa (Oct. 8, 2026) (report); Human Rights Watch, “You Have Arrived in Hell”: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison (Nov. 12, 2025) (report); Human Rights First, “In the Middle of the Night, They Come and Get You” (Oct. 2026) (report); Third Country Deportation Watch, Equatorial Guinea (record).
• On this site: Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, Eswatini, Palau, El Salvador, Liberia and Ghana country guides; the Equatorial Guinea petition to the African Commission; Third-Country Removal Is a Pretext for Refoulement; Part 4 and Part 6 of this series.