Deported for Leverage: How the U.S. May Be Trading Human Lives for Diplomatic Favors

DISAPPEARED: A Nation on Trial — Part Two. When the U.S. can’t deport you home, they strike a deal. With whoever’s willing. No ties, no safety, no rights. Just leverage.

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong."
— Voltaire

"The disappearance of a single human is a crime. The disappearance of many is policy."
— Eduardo Galeano

A Phone Call That Never Came

The first sign was a robotic voice.

“This call is from a federal detention facility and may be monitored or recorded.”

Then a recording that our client had been transferred again, this time to a facility hours away. No warning. No notice. Just movement. Then silence.

The sound was choked by static. A buzz of background chatter. And beneath it, a soft, strained voice.

“Paper... ICE... didn’t sign...”

Then the line went dead.

“Thank you for using Telmate,” chirped the voice. The same voice that gets paid, over and over, for broken calls from broken systems. For charging the desperate to hear the frightened. For wringing profit from human isolation.

That was the last time I heard from him.

This isn’t a question of detention anymore. Or even deportation. This is about disposal. Disappearance as diplomacy. The United States government is moving people into the custody of foreign powers, not as a matter of legal process, but as part of backchannel political trades. It’s no longer about sending people “home.” It’s about sending them somewhere. Anywhere. As long as it closes a file.

The Lie of Removal

We’re supposed to have rules for this.

“Removal” is the term the government uses. Not because it sounds better than “deportation,” though it does. But because it’s supposed to mean something. It’s meant to describe the process by which someone is returned to their country of origin. Or to the country where they last legally lived. A place where the person has citizenship. Language. History. People. Some thread of belonging, no matter how fragile.

But ICE has rewritten that meaning in secret. They’ve turned legal definition into semantic camouflage.

Libya. South Africa. South Sudan.

I’ve seen deportation orders listing each of those destinations. But not once have I represented a client who was a citizen of any of those countries. Not once did ICE bother to prove the person had any right to return there. The orders didn’t include interviews. They weren’t accompanied by credible fear screenings. There were no findings of admissibility by the receiving governments. In some cases, there weren’t even documents. Just decisions. Just silence.

And when I said this publicly when I told ABC News that I don’t even know where my client is. I meant it. I still don’t.

Let’s be clear. My client has been disappeared. We do not know where he is.

And I’m not the only one. Lawyers across the country are reporting the same thing. Men transferred in the middle of the night. Sent away without warning. With no confirmed arrival. No public record. Just a vanishing.

Third Country Removal as Policy, Not Exception

So how do they justify this?

They point to a provision tucked away in federal law: 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(2)(E). It allows ICE to deport someone to a third country if removal to the person’s home country is “impracticable, inadvisable, or impossible.”

That clause was meant to be narrow. A last resort. Rare. And subject to legal safeguards.

But now, it’s the playbook.

Instead of negotiating returns with a person’s home government, the administration is shopping deportees like geopolitical poker chips. Offering foreign nations favors in exchange for accepting bodies. No asylum review. No notice to counsel. No proof that the receiving country has agreed. Or even knows.

In theory, ICE is supposed to notify the person, document the decision, and allow for objections. In practice? My client was handed a paper listing South Sudan as his removal destination. He doesn’t speak Arabic. He doesn’t have family there. He’s never been.

That piece of paper was never signed.

And when I finally got a copy? He wasn’t even afforded an interpreter.

The government is invoking legal exceptions as if they were blank checks. Using ambiguity to mask coordination. Telling the courts one thing, while doing another.

This is not how sovereign decisions should be made. This is not how justice operates.

This is the use of law as cover for deal-making.

And people are disappearing because of it.

The Modern Slave Market: What’s the U.S. Getting in Return?

It’s time to ask the question no one wants to answer. If the United States is deporting men to countries they’ve never seen, countries with no paperwork, no preparation, no rights or legal consent… what are we getting in return?

In El Salvador, rumors surfaced of a quiet deal to accept deported Venezuelans. In exchange? Political concessions. Cooperation on other immigration enforcement. An easy win to add to the scoreboard.

Equatorial Guinea. Angola. South Sudan. Each one tied in some way to U.S. foreign policy priorities. A new regime open to U.S. arms contracts. A shift away from Chinese or Russian influence. A promise made behind closed doors in exchange for letting our government disappear the evidence.

Ask yourself. What would it take for a country to suddenly accept stateless men? No birth certificate. No passport. No language in common. Would you take them? Now, what if the U.S. sweetened the deal? With weapons? With energy partnerships? With access to American contractors?

This isn’t conjecture. This is historical pattern.

Historical Precedents: America’s Long History of Weaponizing Deportation

This didn’t start with Trump. It didn’t start with Biden. This country has long treated deportation not as law enforcement, but as foreign policy by other means. A tool. A trade. A show of force.

In 1954, the so-called Operation Wetback swept across border communities in the Southwest. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them U.S. citizens and legal residents, were rounded up in mass raids and dumped across the border into Mexico without hearings, legal review, or even the chance to collect their children. Entire families were shattered. The motive? Political optics. A crackdown for the cameras. Fear dressed up as order.

In the early 1990s, Haitian refugees fleeing military violence tried to reach the U.S. by sea. Instead, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted them and forced them back without asylum screenings. Many were returned to the very regime they had fled. A regime documented to have carried out beatings, detentions, and killings of political opponents. The courts called it a policy. The survivors called it betrayal.

Then came the 2019 “safe third country” agreement with Guatemala. Under threat of economic sanctions, Guatemala was strong-armed into accepting asylum seekers who had passed through its territory, despite not having the infrastructure, safety, or human rights guarantees to protect them. It was a diplomatic win for the White House and a death sentence for many.

In each case, removal wasn’t about justice. It was about leverage. About who could be made to look tough, or win concessions, or control the optics in an election year.

History repeats itself when impunity becomes the norm. And when it does, we call it policy.

Legal Nullification by Geopolitics

Under international law, you cannot deport someone to a country where they face a risk of persecution or torture. You cannot send someone to a nation where they’ve never lived, whose language they cannot speak, whose government never agreed to receive them.

And yet that’s exactly what we’re watching happen.

The United States is invoking 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(2)(E) as a loophole wide enough to fly a deportation plane through. It says the government can deport a person to a third country if it’s “impracticable” to send them home. But that clause was never meant to justify diplomatic horse-trading.

Now it’s being used not as an exception, but as a new policy. A standard operating procedure. A way to bypass courts, ignore asylum, and disappear the evidence.

We’ve seen judges try to stop it. Judge Murphy’s orders demanded accountability. But now the administration is telling the Supreme Court to step aside. That removal is foreign policy. That courts can’t interfere, even when the result is someone being thrown into a war zone.

The argument? That the Constitution ends where diplomacy begins.

The stakes couldn’t be clearer. If this precedent holds, there will be no limit. Any person, any place, any time. All it takes is a signature.

Who Profits from the Trade in Bodies?

Someone is always making money.

Start with the flights. These disappearances don’t happen by magic. They happen on secretive charter flights, run by private contractors with federal immigration deals worth hundreds of millions. Companies like iAero and Avelo Airlines. Planes with blacked-out manifests, flight paths scrubbed from public view, passengers loaded in shackles.

Then there’s the detention industrial complex. GEO Group, CoreCivic. The private prisons raking in federal dollars while warehousing immigrants in remote, access-starved facilities. The further away from lawyers, from oversight, from community, the better. That isolation is part of the business model.

And then, arms. Infrastructure. Bargains. What does the U.S. government receive in exchange for offloading non-citizens to third countries with no legal claim over them? Could it be diplomatic alignment? Military access? UN votes? One hand washing the other, greased by bodies that no one will claim.

This isn’t just bad policy. It’s a marketplace. And the currency is human lives.

The Diplomatic Bottom Line

Let’s call it what it is.

The United States government is striking deals with fragile regimes, some teetering on the edge of collapse, to take in disappeared detainees. The price? Often small. A vote at the United Nations. Access to critical minerals. A pause on criticism in a regional dispute. In exchange, the U.S. delivers silence. And bodies.

Take Djibouti. A long-standing U.S. military partner. A port of strategic value. Or Equatorial Guinea, whose oil reserves have attracted American interest for years. Or South Sudan, where China has been investing heavily and where U.S. presence now has a new, human bargaining chip.

What happens when your immigration policy becomes indistinguishable from your foreign policy? When deportation isn’t about safety or justice, but leverage?

You get a system where a person’s final destination is determined not by law, but by diplomacy. A place where you don’t have to be a citizen, speak the language, or have family there. You just need to be disposable. And politically useful.

The Moral Frontier

By now, you’ve met them. If not by name, then by story.

The man who called me once from detention. I could barely hear his voice. “Paper,” he said. “ICE… didn’t sign.” And then the line went dead.

The man ICE tried to send to South Sudan. A country he had never seen, whose language he couldn’t speak, whose war he may not survive.

These are not abstract cases. These are lives, vanished into legal shadow.

The government wants you to think this is about criminal records. But if it were, due process would still apply. Legal access would still be respected. Court orders would still be obeyed.

This isn’t about crimes. It’s about contempt. Contempt for the courts. Contempt for international law. Contempt for human life.

And if we allow this contempt to stand, what happens when the government turns it on others? What happens when the unpopular becomes the uncooperative? When it’s not only immigrants, but their lawyers, their doctors, their allies?

The question is no longer whether this regime will test the limits of the Constitution. It’s whether we will let it.

Names on Paper, Bodies in Limbo

Many of the men we have represented still have no confirmed whereabouts.

ICE claims they were removed. But they won’t say where. The documents contradict each other. One removal order says Libya. Another says South Africa. Another: South Sudan. None of them make sense. None of them come with answers.

These aren’t removals. They’re redactions. As if these men were errors in a document the government decided to erase.

But we are not errors. We are not disposable. We are not bargaining chips.

And if we want to live in a constitutional democracy, then we must treat due process not as a formality, but as a lifeline. Not just for the innocent. But for everyone. Because that’s how we protect all of us: by defending the rights of the least protected.

CALL TO ACTION

Soon, the Supreme Court could decide whether to hear the government’s appeal. An appeal that argues ICE should be allowed to continue these disappearances. That the courts have no role. That the Constitution stops where the deportation order starts.

We cannot be silent.

Join our Firewall organizing calls. We gather every Monday at 7:00 PM ET, 6:00 PM CT, 4:00 PM PT. Be part of the growing movement resisting authoritarian expansion through the backdoor of immigration law.

👉 RSVP here:

Share this article. Tag journalists. Submit FOIAs. Demand congressional oversight. Call your representatives.

And stay tuned. Because the next installment drops tomorrow.

Part Three: “The Supreme Court’s Silence: Will They Let the Disappearances Continue?”

If the ruling comes, you’ll hear from me Sunday.

And if they don’t rule? We’ll be louder.

Together.