United States
The state that sends people. Three federal courts have found the programme punitive, and the United States accepted the state-to-state complaint procedure under the Convention against Torture while declining the one that lets an individual complain.
- Arrangement reported
- Yes
- Transfers reported
- Yes
- People with protection among them
- Yes
- Onward return reported
- Yes
These are statements about the public record, not about the country. "Investigating" means the Coalition has not located a report or a decision on that point and is still looking. It is not a finding that the thing did not happen.
Basis: findings by United States federal courts, the enumeration of punishments given by the President of the United States, and the depositary record of what the United States has and has not accepted. The Coalition does not record a practice of torture by the United States. It records that the risk of return to torture created by the way it carries out removals has been found, by its own courts, to be real and unaddressed, and that the removals have been found to be punitive.
- The President of the United States, quoted and judicially noticed
People who remain in the country without authorisation “face punishments, including significant jail time… and sudden deportation in a place and manner solely of our discretion.” Removal at the government’s sole choice of destination appears on that list as a punishment, alongside imprisonment.
- United States District Court, 17 November 2025
The practice of third-country removal paired with imprisonment “is intended to be punitive and thus violates due process.” In the same line of cases the government filed no argument on the point at all.
- United States District Court, 18 April 2025
The assurances relied on “are not individualized,” the guidance “provides for no review,” and blanket assurances “offer no protection against either torture by non-state actors or chain refoulement.” Asked whether it could remove a person with no chance to say “I will be killed the moment I arrive there,” counsel for the government answered: “In short, yes.”
- United Nations Human Rights Committee, 30 October 2023
The removal measures “compromise the quality of the assessment of individual protection needs and increase the risk of breaches of the principle of non-refoulement.”
- United Nations Treaty Collection, the depositary record
The United States made the declaration under article 21, which accepts complaints from other states on a condition of reciprocity, and has never made the declaration under article 22, which is the one that lets an individual complain. No person in the United States can petition the Committee against Torture.
Why this page is here. This section holds the states whose own conduct breaches the prohibition, judged by the same standard the Coalition applies everywhere. The United States is here because it sends people, and because the risk described on every country guide on this site begins with a decision taken here. The other states in this section have no part in that programme and appear for conduct of their own. What a receiving state agrees to.
What has happened
Since January 2025 the United States has removed people to countries that are not their own, under arrangements with more than thirty governments, most of which have never been published. Monitoring organisations describe more than 23,000 transfers and more than $49 million in United States funding connected to the arrangements.
Arrangements. Thirty-five states are recorded as having agreed to receive people. The monitoring project counted twenty-six as having actually received them as of early August 2026, and at least one more has received people since, Liberia, on 20 August 2026. The texts are almost all undisclosed. Where terms are known, it is usually because a monitoring organisation obtained them under freedom of information law rather than because either government published them.
People holding protection. Among those removed are people to whom United States immigration judges had already granted withholding of removal or protection under the Convention against Torture, meaning a judge had found they were more likely than not to face persecution or torture if returned.
The practice has not stopped. On 6 May 2026 a federal district court recorded, of a woman granted withholding of removal to Georgia in December 2024 and held in immigration detention ever since, that “Respondents indicated that they intend to move forward with the third-country removal of Petitioner, and that they had been prepared to do so last month, but for the Court’s issuance of a Temporary Restraining Order… precluding such removal without certain specific procedural protections.” The court had ordered that she not be removed to a third country without seven days’ notice, without a reasonable fear interview about that country, or at all if an officer found her fear reasonable. On 5 June 2026 the same court granted her petition and ordered her released within four days. She had been detained since June 2024, and for eighteen months of that time a judge had already ruled she could not be sent home.
Onward return. Documented. People sent to a third country have been returned from it to the country they had fled, in one recorded case within about twenty-four hours.
Notice. In the cases that reached court, people were moved with little or no notice of where they were being taken, and no opportunity to say what waited for them there.
What the courts have said about the purpose.
Three federal courts have addressed whether these removals are punitive. On 21 August 2025 a court took judicial notice of official public statements and held that they “do offer evidence that third country deportation is occurring as a punishment.” On 17 November 2025 a court held that the practice of third-country removal paired with imprisonment “is intended to be punitive and thus violates due process,” and recorded that the government had not addressed the merits of the claim, leaving the court “with no argument from respondents to consider on this topic.” On 21 November 2025 a court enjoined a removal carried out “pursuant to Respondents’ unconstitutionally punitive third-country removal program.”
A fourth court, reviewing a removal to Ghana, found the conduct “part of a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.”
The authority that runs the other way. All three of those decisions are district court orders. Higher courts have held repeatedly that removal is a civil matter and not punishment, and that an incidental deterrent effect does not change that. The Supreme Court has said that removal is “a civil, not criminal, matter,” and courts of appeals have held that the Eighth Amendment does not reach deportation. What the three orders record is narrower and more recent: that on the facts before them, where removal was paired with imprisonment and officials had stated a purpose of deterring others, the measure was punitive. The Coalition reports the disagreement and does not resolve it.
The Coalition reports what these courts decided and does not offer any reading of United States law. Every order is linked below and should be read rather than relied on through this summary.
What the United States has accepted, and what it declined
This section is about the Convention against Torture, and it is the part of this page that will surprise most readers.
The United States signed the Convention on 18 April 1988 and ratified it on 21 October 1994. It enacted its protections in domestic law. It has objected, in the depositary record, to other states’ reservations to the very articles at issue here: in 2011 it objected to Pakistan’s reservations to articles 3, 4, 6, 12, 13 and 16, stating that the combination of those reservations was “incompatible with the object and purpose” of the Convention. Article 3 is the non-refoulement article.
On the two declarations that decide whether anyone can complain, the record reads as follows. The United States declared, under article 21, that it recognises the competence of the Committee to consider complaints brought by one state against another, and added that it understands such communications will be accepted “only if they come from a State Party which has made a similar declaration.”
It has never made the declaration under article 22. Article 22 is the one that allows an individual, or someone acting for them, to complain to the Committee. Without it the Committee has no competence to receive a complaint from a person in the United States at all.
The United States is also not a party to the first Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, so the Human Rights Committee is closed to an individual as well. It is not a party to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, so there are no preventive visits and no national mechanism is owed.
The Coalition sets this out without comment beyond one observation, which is a matter of record rather than of opinion. This is the same position as Uganda’s. Uganda made the article 21 declaration on 19 December 2001 and never made the article 22 declaration, and this site says of Uganda that the state-to-state procedure “gives a detained person nothing.” The sentence is equally true here.
United Nations Treaty Collection, chapters IV-9, IV-9-b and IV-5, the depositary’s own record rather than a secondary table. Checked 9 September 2026 and linked below.
What United Nations bodies have said
The Coalition is precise about what exists here, because the record is often described loosely.
There is no recent United Nations finding about these removals. The Committee against Torture last reported on the United States in 2014. The United States is not in default: it filed its sixth periodic report in 2022 and the Committee has never scheduled the review. The delay is the Committee’s, and the funding crisis has made it worse.
The most recent finding is from the Human Rights Committee, on 30 October 2023, which recorded that the removal measures “compromise the quality of the assessment of individual protection needs and increase the risk of breaches of the principle of non-refoulement,” and recommended withdrawing measures that increase the risk of refoulement.
What exists from 2025 and 2026 is a different kind of record, and it is uncontested. United Nations special procedures have sent the United States fifty-nine communications since 1 January 2025. The United States has replied to none of them. Among them are an urgent appeal of 23 April 2025 signed by twelve mandate holders; one of 6 August 2025 stating that the removals appear to contravene “the obligations of non-refoulement (including the prohibition on ‘chain refoulement’)”; and one of 19 January 2026 stating that the obligation “is absolute and without exception.”
A communication is an allegation put to a state, not a finding against it, and this site never calls one a finding. What can be said is that the allegations were made by the United Nations mechanisms established for the purpose, and that the United States has neither answered nor denied them.
On 7 November 2025 the United States did not appear for its own Universal Periodic Review and filed no national report.
What is not established
That any United Nations body has found the United States responsible for refoulement. None has, and nothing on this page should be read as saying otherwise. That the treatment of people held pending third-country removal amounts to torture as United States law defines it; that question turns on a requirement of specific intent that no public record yet meets. The full texts of the arrangements with most of the thirty-five states. The number of people removed who held protection ordered by a court, which the government has been asked for and has not provided.
The Coalition writes Investigating rather than none found, because the second phrase reads as though a question has been answered when it has only been asked.
What this page does not yet carry
A section naming the organisations inside the United States that act for people facing removal to a third country, with verified contact details. The Coalition is compiling it and would rather publish nothing than publish a number that does not answer. In the meantime this project’s own page of organisations is the best available starting point: Where to Find Help.
The date and setting of the President’s statement quoted above. It is quoted here as reproduced and judicially noticed by a federal court, and the Coalition has not located the original recording. If you can supply it, the Coalition wants it.
If you can correct anything on this page, the Coalition wants to hear it.
Sources
Every source relied on above, linked so it can be read in full rather than through this summary.
Federal court records. Kurdobadze v. Venegas, No. 1:25-cv-00157 (S.D. Tex.), the order of 6 May 2026 and the order of 5 June 2026 granting the writ. D.V.D. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:25-cv-10676-BEM (D. Mass.), order of 18 April 2025. Nguyen v. Scott, No. 2:25-cv-01398-TMC (W.D. Wash.), order of 21 August 2025. Abubaka v. Bondi, No. 2:25-cv-01889-RSL (W.D. Wash.), order of 17 November 2025. Hambarsonpour v. Bondi, No. 2:25-cv-01802-RSM (W.D. Wash.), order of 21 November 2025. D.A. v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-03135-TSC (D.D.C.), memorandum opinion of 15 September 2025.
Treaty status, from the depositary. Convention against Torture, for the ratification of 21 October 1994, the article 21 declaration, the absence of any article 22 declaration, and the 2011 objection to Pakistan’s reservations. Optional Protocol to the Convention. First Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in which the United States does not appear.
United Nations bodies. Human Rights Committee, concluding observations on the United States, CCPR/C/USA/CO/5, 30 October 2023. Special procedures communications database. United Nations experts, 8 July 2025, on diplomatic assurances. The High Commissioner for Human Rights, 13 May 2025.
United States Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations, minority staff report, At What Cost, February 2026.
Compiled 9 September 2026. Where this page summarises a decision or a report, the full document is linked above and should be read rather than relied on through the summary.