Protected From Deportation, Deported Anyway

A protected man, a blank space on a removal notice, and a government working down a list of countries until one says yes.

Nabil reports to a federal building on a morning he expects to be routine. He has done it for years. He is an Iraqi Chaldean Christian who came here as a boy, held a green card, lost it to two convictions born of a heroin addiction he beat before his children were born, and stayed because in 2001 an immigration judge ordered that he could be removed to any country except Iraq. That order still stands. No one has ever lifted it.

This morning an officer hands him a letter. It tells him to get a travel document and prepare to leave. Not to Iraq. The letter does not say where.

He asks where. The officer does not know. Knowing is not the officer’s job; the letter is. Somewhere above the counter a list is being worked, and the officer’s part of it ends when the paper changes hands.

That blank has a history, and it is not a straight line. For a while the government looked the other way, hunting for a third country and asking Nabil where else he had people. He has none. Everyone he loves is here. It seemed to give up on that. Then it lurched back and told him to obtain a passport for Iraq itself, the one place the order forbids. This morning’s letter is the next lurch. The blank on it is where a country goes, if the government ever finds one it can lawfully use. That blank, and the churn around it, is the subject of this post.

Sit with the last year from where Nabil stands. He has an order of supervision and a work permit. He checks in when he is told to. Late one year an officer looked at his file, saw a man with no foreign ties and a quarter century of compliance, and told him in writing not to come back for two years. Months later, with no mention of that, another officer ordered him to report within weeks and to go obtain an Iraqi passport, which Iraq will not hand to a Christian family that fled it as refugees and holds no Iraqi papers at all. He wrote to the consulate and asked. They answered, in writing, that they cannot issue it. Then a letter arrived telling him the trip was off, for now.

Come in. Do not come in. Get documents that do not exist.

He has been sober for twenty years. He works a skilled trade, raises two American children, and pays for his own lawyer and his own clemency petition out of what he earns. Officers hand his file back and forth, and none of them seems to have read it. His compliance does not protect him; it keeps him legible to the system, on the calendar and easy to move. They do not see the man. They see a case to clear. On the paperwork he is not Nabil. He is an alien registration number, A-078-412-559.

What goes in the blank

The blank is not an oversight. It is the design. And what fills it is a list, a long one, that grows by the month.

Since January 2025 the government has signed removal deals with more than two dozen countries and pursued dozens more. Human Rights First and Refugees International, whose Third Country Deportation Watch follows the flights, count more than 23,000 people shipped to countries not their own, to 26 of them so far, with roughly 44 million dollars in United States money behind the agreements.

The destinations are not gentle. DHS has dropped people into a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. It has sent them to South Sudan and Eswatini, to Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, and Cameroon, to Rwanda, Kosovo, Uzbekistan, Palau, Moldova, and Costa Rica. It tried to fly a group to Libya until a court stopped it. Some of these are places the State Department tells American tourists to stay out of for any reason. The point of the list is not that the countries are safe. The point is that they will open the door of an airplane.

And the countries do not take just anyone. Each agreement names the population the receiving government will accept: single adults, certain nationalities, or, spelled out in more than one deal, convicted criminals. Guatemala took only Central Americans. Eswatini signed up for the people the United States labels criminals, and DHS announced the first flight in exactly those words. So Nabil’s record does not shut these doors. It opens the wrong ones. A possession charge he closed out before his children were born, and a retail-theft case two decades behind him, drop him into the one category these agreements were built to receive. His twenty sober years do not travel. The word convicted does. To the officer working the list, he is not a man who rebuilt his life. He is a checkbox several governments have already agreed to accept.

And the country that takes him does not have to keep him. A woman granted protection in the United States was flown to Ghana, and within a day Ghana put her on a plane back to the country she had fled. Send a protected person to a third country and let that country do the returning, and the United States calls the harm someone else’s act. Chain refoulement launders the one thing the law forbids.

The paperwork is thin on purpose. If the State Department collects a diplomatic assurance that the receiving country will not harm him, Nabil gets no process at all. If there is no assurance, ICE hands him a notice and does not ask whether he is afraid. Silence counts as yes. The plane can leave in 24 hours, or 6 in what ICE calls an exigent case.

So the blank on Nabil’s letter is not sloppiness. It is the whole method. The government does not need to know this morning where he goes. It needs only to keep his removal order alive while it works down the list until some government, somewhere, agrees to take him.

Why the law leaves the blank open

Immigration law protects people by country, not in the abstract. Withholding of removal under 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3) says the government cannot send you to the country where your life or freedom is threatened. Deferral under the Convention Against Torture, 8 C.F.R. § 1208.17, says it cannot send you to the country where you would more likely than not be tortured. Both name a place. Neither confers status. Neither says you may stay. Each says only: not there. Nabil’s 2001 order says not Iraq, and nothing more.

For Nabil the search runs into a wall the government built itself. His deferral holds until an immigration judge lifts it. 8 C.F.R. § 1208.17. A field officer cannot terminate it. Only a judge can, after a hearing and a fresh finding that torture is no longer likely, or the Attorney General can, on formal diplomatic assurances from the receiving country routed through the Secretary of State. § 1208.17(d), (e), (f). No judge has done that, and Iraq has offered no assurance, so the demand that he prepare an Iraqi passport is an order to get ready for a removal the law forbids. The government demands a passport it could not lawfully use, from a consulate that has said in writing it will not issue one, and when no passport appears, the failure is recorded as his. The third-country side is where the money goes, and the law is more permissive there: it lets the government remove him to any country whose government agrees to take him, tie or no tie. 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(2)(E)(vii). The trouble is finding one. He has no connection to any country on the list, and the deals are written around nationalities and around the word criminal, not around a specific Iraqi Chaldean with two-decade-old convictions and a family that is entirely here. Some government has to have a reason to take him, and none does. Barred from the one country, unable to place him in another, the government fills the vacuum with churn.

For decades that narrowness was a technicality. The government had a protected person and nowhere else to put him, so he stayed. On February 18, 2025, ICE turned the technicality into a program. It issued a directive calling withholding and CAT “country-specific protections from removal” that do not bar removal from the United States generally. That is the theory in one line, in the government’s own words. Keep the ban on the one country, and go hunting for a second. The statute even supplies the hunting ground: it lists an order of countries for removal, and a third country comes last, available only when the designated country and the countries of citizenship are “impracticable, inadvisable, or impossible.” 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(2), (b)(2)(E)(vii). DHS now treats that last slot as a first resort.

The fight over whether it may is D.V.D. v. DHS, and any lawyer with a protected client needs to know where it stands this week, because it moves. Judge Brian Murphy in the District of Massachusetts certified a nationwide class, including people in withholding-only proceedings, and enjoined removals to unnamed third countries without notice and a chance to raise a fear. D.V.D. v. DHS, 778 F. Supp. 3d 355 (D. Mass. 2025). On February 25, 2026, he struck the policy on the merits as “not in accordance with law.” D.V.D. v. DHS, No. CV 25-10676-BEM, 2026 WL 521557 (D. Mass. Feb. 25, 2026). None of it is in force. The Supreme Court had already stayed his injunction back on June 23, 2025, in an unsigned order with no reasoning, over a dissent by Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, who called it a gross abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion. DHS v. D.V.D., No. 24A1153 (U.S. June 23, 2025). The First Circuit then stayed the merits ruling too, heard argument on May 13, 2026, and has not decided it. So the policy runs, and the plane matters more than the paperwork.

The case is not an abstraction. It is built on people like its lead plaintiff, O.C.G., a Guatemalan man an immigration judge had already protected from return to Guatemala. He thought he was being released from detention. Instead DHS put him on a bus to Mexico, a country where he had already been raped, with no notice and no chance to say he was afraid. Mexican authorities then handed him a choice that is not a choice: sit months in detention and seek asylum in the country that had brutalized him, or go on to Guatemala, where a judge had already found he would more likely than not be persecuted. He is in hiding in Guatemala now. That is what removal without notice does to a man the law said could not be sent home. Read the complaint and it stops being policy and starts being a series of these.

Third-country removal is not one mechanism. It is a family of them. Nabil’s version runs through a final order and an old protection. A second version runs through the front door: under the Asylum Cooperative Agreements, DHS designates a country like Ecuador as the destination up front and pretermits the protection claim on an individualized-risk showing before it is ever heard, a move I traced through Matter of A-C-M- and its companion decisions earlier this year. Same architecture, different door. This piece is about the first door, the one that opens onto a blank space.

The agreements, and the fight to see them

The Asylum Cooperative Agreements are the paper under that second door. The United States first signed them in 2019 with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, implemented only the Guatemala deal, and suspended all three in 2021. This administration revived and widened them in 2025. Here is where the main Latin American arrangements stand, and what independent country-conditions reports say waits at the other end.

Agreement status and conditions drawn from the Migration and Asylum Lab country reports (February 2026) and the Third Country Deportation Watch.

Notice what the table cannot give you: the agreements themselves. Most have never been published. When the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and Refugees International sued the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act for the deals with Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica, the government produced only heavily redacted records. NILA and Refugees International v. U.S. Department of State (D. Mass., filed June 2025); the transparency docket is public. An earlier suit pried loose ICE’s records on removing withholding and CAT grantees to non-designated countries, which is Nabil’s exact situation. The transparency fights make the same point D.V.D. does from the other side: a policy this consequential runs largely out of sight, and the people it targets, along with their lawyers, are left to argue against documents they are not allowed to read.

He did everything. No door opens.

Here is the part that makes the blank space cruel. Nabil cannot fill it with a way out, because every exit the system seems to offer is sealed.

Start with the pardon he has pending before the Governor. It sounds more powerful than it is. Congress gave a full pardon real immigration effect, but only for listed grounds: crimes of moral turpitude, multiple convictions, aggravated felonies, high-speed flight. 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(A)(vi); Matter of Suh, 23 I&N Dec. 626 (BIA 2003). Congress left drug offenses off the list, and courts have said so plainly. Nunez-Reyes v. Holder, 646 F.3d 684 (9th Cir. 2011) (en banc) (no pardon of a drug offense is recognized under the INA); Eskite v. District Director, 901 F. Supp. 530 (E.D.N.Y. 1995). The Governor could forgive the theft and mean every word, and the heroin conviction would keep doing its work.

Try to vacate the conviction, and, in Illinois, immigration law still asks why. Vacate it for a substantive or procedural defect in the case and it is gone; vacate it out of mercy, or to spare the immigration fallout, and he is still convicted. Matter of Pickering, 23 I&N Dec. 621 (BIA 2003), rev’d on other grounds, 465 F.3d 263 (6th Cir. 2006); Ali v. Ashcroft, 395 F.3d 722, 728-29 (7th Cir. 2005). A sympathetic prosecutor cannot manufacture a defect that never existed, and twenty-year-old files fight back.

That rule is less solid than it was a month ago. In August the Fourth Circuit walked away from it. In Yanez Piedra v. Blanche, No. 25-1258 (4th Cir. Aug. 24, 2026), the court read the inadmissibility statute for itself, without the deference that used to prop up the Board, and held that a person whose conviction has been vacated and the charge dismissed is simply not an “alien convicted of” the offense under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(2)(A)(i). Why the state court vacated it no longer matters. That reaches straight into Nabil’s case, because Ali never held the Board had the statute right. It held the Board’s reading was reasonable enough to defer to under Chevron, the deference the Supreme Court overruled in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024). Pull the deference out and Ali‘s footing is exposed. The Fourth Circuit was careful: it decided vacaturs, not expungements or set-asides, and only this one statute, and it is one circuit. For now, in Illinois, Ali still binds, so he still needs a real defect. And even a clean win would open only his path to admissibility, the family door years off. It would not touch the removal order that is final today, or the third country the government is hunting for right now.

Try to build a new status through his family, and the wall is inadmissibility. His children are three and five, too young to petition for anyone. The day the oldest turns 21 and files, the visa is not the problem; admissibility is, because the drug conviction makes him inadmissible under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(2)(A)(i)(II). The § 212(h) waiver reaches almost nothing for drugs: a single offense of simple possession of 30 grams or less of marijuana, and no more. Heroin is not marijuana. That carve-out is narrow on both sides of the statute, on the deportability side too, as the Board explained in Matter of Davey, 26 I&N Dec. 37 (BIA 2012), which I covered when it came down. The family door opens years from now onto a wall built in the 1990s.

You might reach, finally, for prosecutorial discretion. For years it was the quiet mechanism that let a man like Nabil stay: the government held a final order it could not carry out, so it forbore, and he lived on supervision, checking in, working, raising his children. That instinct is now policy in reverse. Executive Order 14159 revoked the enforcement priorities that had guided such forbearance, directed every agency to strip out the guidance beneath them, and names people with final orders of removal as targets rather than candidates for mercy. And notice how strange the ask has become. Discretion is normally a front-end question, whether to charge a person or put him in proceedings at all. Nabil is long past that. He is not asking the government to decline to start his case; he is asking it to decline to finish one particular way, to stop hunting for a third country and leave a protected man where the law already left him. That is discretion over how hard to work a removal, not whether to bring one, and it is exactly the forbearance the February directive told officers to withhold.

They do not have to solve any of it.

Now put the two halves together, because the collision is the whole point.

Nabil has done everything the system asks. He served his sentences. He beat the addiction that caused them. He has stayed clean for twenty years, raised two citizen children, worked a trade, reported to ICE on schedule, and asked the Governor for mercy. A judge has already found he would be tortured in Iraq. And none of it opens a door, as the last section showed. He cannot pardon his way out, litigate his way out, or marry and petition his way out.

But here is the turn. The government does not need any of those doors to open, because it is not trying to fix his status. It is trying to remove him, and removal no longer requires solving the thing that keeps him here. DHS does not have to undo his order. It does not have to reckon with his sobriety, his family, his work, or his pardon. It does not have to find a way to legalize a man it has authorized to live and work here for a quarter century. It has to do one thing. It has to find a country.

But here is where Nabil turns the policy inside out. For most people the list is long enough that the government finds a taker in the end. For him it may not. The deals that take a nationality do not take his. The deals that take people the government calls criminals have no reason to want a specific Iraqi Chaldean with old convictions and no tie to Eswatini or Rwanda or Ghana. And the one country he is actually from, the country this whole effort exists to route around, will not issue him a passport. Block Iraq, and the government looks down the list, and the list looks back with no place for this particular man.

So ask the question his file forces. If they cannot send him to Iraq, and cannot find a third country that will take him, what are the 44 million dollars and the two dozen signed agreements actually buying? Not his removal. They are buying the threat of it. The notice that comes and gets pulled. The passport demand that cannot be met. The check-in that leaps from two years out to next week and back. For a man like Nabil, that churn is not the program failing. It is the program working. The government does not need an airport to punish him. It needs him to keep waiting for one.

The floor

Now read the number on the tracker as what it is. More than 23,000 people already flown to countries not their own since January 2025, another 30,679 whose asylum cases were pretermitted through June 2026 under the Asylum Cooperative Agreements, and tens of thousands more left in limbo, told not there and waiting to learn where. Each of them comes with a file, and the files come with problems, as everyone’s does. But the number is not a tally of successful deportations. It is a measure of how many people the government has taught to be afraid.

Nabil has not been flown anywhere. Not yet. His file sits in the narrow space between a protection that holds and a policy that does not care, and the only thing standing in that space is a lawyer who saw the next country coming.

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