The states named in this project are not bystanders to the United States third-country removal programme. They are participants in it, and they knew what they were participating in before they agreed.
The purpose is not in doubt, and it is not the Coalition that established it
The President of the United States has said, of people who remain in the country without authorisation, that they “face punishments, including significant jail time, enormous financial penalties, confiscation of all property, garnishment of all wages, imprisonment and incarceration, and sudden deportation in a place and manner solely of our discretion.” Removal to a place and in a manner chosen at the government’s sole discretion appears on that list as a punishment, in the President’s own enumeration, alongside imprisonment.
Three federal courts have since found the programme punitive.
- On 21 August 2025 a federal court took judicial notice of those and other official statements and held that they “do offer evidence that third country deportation is occurring as a punishment.”
- On 17 November 2025 a federal court held that “the government’s practice of third-country removal paired with imprisonment is intended to be punitive and thus violates due process.”
- On 21 November 2025 a federal court enjoined a removal carried out “pursuant to Respondents’ unconstitutionally punitive third-country removal program.”
In the November case the court recorded that the government had put up no defence to the point at all: it “do[es] not address the merits of petitioner’s claim that the current third-country removal policy is unconstitutionally punitive,” which left the court “with no argument from respondents to consider on this topic.”
A current United States official told Senate investigators in December 2025, on condition that the official not be identified, that with countries like Palau or Eswatini “the point is that the Administration can threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere. The point is to scare people.” Another told the same investigators that third-country removals function as a “scare tactic” and a “hugely expensive deterrent,” intended to keep people from coming, to intimidate them into abandoning asylum claims, or to induce them to leave on their own. Those two officials spoke anonymously and the Coalition says so plainly. They are not the basis of anything on this page. They are what the courts and the President have already established, said out loud by people who administer it.
What a receiving state supplies, and what it switches off
A receiving state does not merely open a door. It provides the diplomatic assurance, and the assurance is the component that removes the protections.
On 18 April 2025 a federal court examined the guidance under which these removals are carried out and found that where the United States has obtained an assurance from a receiving country, a person may be removed there without notice. It found that those assurances “are not individualized,” that the guidance “provides for no review,” and that deportations may therefore occur “without any consideration of the individual risks facing a particular alien.” It found that blanket assurances “offer no protection against either torture by non-state actors or chain refoulement, whereby the third country proceeds to return an individual to his country of origin.”
That is the transaction. The receiving state gives a general promise about people it has never met, and that promise is what allows a person to be put on an aircraft without being told where they are going and without any chance to say what waits for them there. The court described what the people bringing that case were asking for as a “small modicum of process”: to be told the country, and to be heard on whether they would be persecuted, tortured or killed in it. Asked whether the government could remove someone with no notice and no opportunity to say “I will be killed the moment I arrive there,” so long as it did not already know that someone was “standing there waiting to shoot him,” counsel for the government answered: “In short, yes.”
A separate court, reviewing a removal to Ghana, found the government’s conduct “part of a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.” Doing it indirectly requires another government. That is the role the states in this project agreed to fill.
Knowing facilitation
The Coalition’s position is this. Every state that agreed to receive people who are not its nationals, moved against their will, under this programme, has knowingly facilitated it. The purpose was public. It was stated by the President, recorded by federal courts, and described in blunter terms by the officials who run it. No government that signed a note or a memorandum after those statements were made can say it did not know what it was joining, and none of them has said so.
The wrong is complete at the moment of agreement. It is not contingent on what the receiving state does afterwards, on how it houses people, on whether it is itself a state that tortures, or on whether anyone has yet been returned onward from it. A government that agrees to take human beings delivered as a warning to others has accepted a role in delivering the warning. The Coalition regards this as among the gravest violations of human dignity documented anywhere in its work: not because of what any one receiving country is, but because of what all of them together make possible.
This is not a rule the Coalition invented for this programme. A state that knowingly assists another state’s violation of the prohibition of torture is answerable for its own part in it. That principle is general, it applies to every government and to every arrangement of this kind wherever it is found, and it would apply in exactly the same terms if the sending state were any other.
A domestic record is not a defence
A parliament that objected, a court that was asked, a minister who resisted, a directive issued after the fact: these are facts about a country’s politics. They do not bear on whether the state took the people. Every state named in this project took them, or agreed to take them. Nothing of that kind appears on these pages as mitigation and no reader should treat it as any.
What would have made this lawful
This is not an objection to removal, and the Coalition has never made one. A state may remove a person who is subject to removal.
Had the United States carried these removals out lawfully and in keeping with its own Constitution, had it observed the obligations it has accepted under international human rights law, had it moved people in a manner that respected their dignity rather than handcuffed and shackled on military aircraft toward destinations they were not told, and had the receiving state offered a real and fair place to settle rather than a holding room and a ticket home, there would be nothing wrong in any of it, and this project would have no subject.
The objection is to what has been added to removal, and to the governments that agreed to receive what was added.
Why these pages still describe local law and local institutions
For one reason. Someone has been sent to that country, and someone else is trying to reach them. Which court exists, which office answers, which lawyer can be called: that is written for the person it was done to, and for the family and the lawyer trying to find them. It is not a credit to the state, and it is not offered as one.
Sources
Every source relied on above, linked so it can be read in full rather than through this summary. The Coalition reports what these courts and officials said and does not offer any reading of United States law.
Federal court records. D.V.D. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:25-cv-10676-BEM (D. Mass.), order of 18 April 2025, on notice, on blanket diplomatic assurances and on chain refoulement. Nguyen v. Scott, No. 2:25-cv-01398-TMC (W.D. Wash.), order of 21 August 2025, taking judicial notice of official statements. Hambarsonpour v. Bondi, No. 2:25-cv-01802-RSM (W.D. Wash.), order of 21 November 2025. Abubaka v. Bondi, No. 2:25-cv-01889-RSL (W.D. Wash.), order of 17 November 2025. D.A. v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-03135-TSC (D.D.C.), memorandum opinion of 15 September 2025, at 4.
United States Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations, minority staff report, At What Cost: Inside the Trump Administration’s Secret Deportation Deals, February 2026, at 14 for both anonymous officials.
A note on one citation. The President’s words are quoted here as they were reproduced and judicially noticed by the court in Nguyen v. Scott. The Coalition has not located the original recording and does not cite it as though it had. If you can supply the date and setting, the Coalition wants it.
A correction the Coalition makes to a source it relies on. The Senate minority report cites the “pattern and widespread effort to evade” language to the plaintiffs’ motion rather than to the court’s own opinion. The words are the judge’s, in her memorandum opinion. This site cites the opinion.