Refugees International and Human Rights First jointly run Third Country Deportation Watch, the monitoring project cited on nearly every country guide the Coalition maintains. On 18 August 2026 that project published the programme-wide totals. CBS News reported them.
The broadcast reports the figure. The figure belongs to Refugees International, and the Coalition read it at source rather than taking it from the segment.
Checked 11 September 2026Watch on YouTube instead
The figure as its authors state it:
“Between January 20, 2025 and August 15, 2026, the U.S. government has forcibly transferred more than 23,000 people to 26 third countries where many have no legal or personal ties, and many have been subjected to arbitrary detention, family separations, and chain refoulement.”
The breakdown is the story, and the figure given without it misleads. Refugees International states that almost 20,000 of those people were sent to Mexico, more than 2,700 to other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, more than 330 to countries in Africa, and more than 200 to other regions. About eighty-seven per cent of the total is one country. The whole of Africa, across the thirteen guides the Coalition maintains there, is a few hundred people.
A second figure in the same statement carries further than the first. The administration has summarily rejected, or pretermitted, more than 30,000 individual asylum claims under the Asylum Cooperative Agreements, and has sent between 200 and 300 people to the four countries that signed them: Belize, Ecuador, Honduras and Uganda. That is somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty asylum claims cancelled for every person actually transferred.
Set against the same organisation’s statement three months earlier, the pretermissions have doubled and the number of people sent to agreement countries has doubled. Those two subtractions are the Coalition’s own, from figures published by one organisation.