The Donald Trump administration spent more than US$35 million to deport roughly 300 migrants to countries they had no connection to, doling out millions of dollars in lump sum transfers to foreign governments without a system to track how the money was used, according to a report released on Friday.
The bulk of the money – US$32 million – went to Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, El Salvador, Palau and eSwatini.
The figures from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats average out to a cost of roughly US$116,666 per person deported. In Rwanda, which received seven deportees, the total cost reached about US$1.1 million per person, the report found.
The report outlines the cost of President Donald Trump’s controversial policy of sending non-citizens to countries other than their own.
The White House has argued that this method is necessary to remove undocumented criminals whose home nations would not take them.
Venezuelans deported from the United States disembark at Simon Bolivar International Airport in Maiquetia on January 19. Photo: AP
Immigration groups that have challenged the practice in court have said the practice had wide-ranging effects on law-abiding non-citizens who were at risk of being sent to unfamiliar countries with little, if any, opportunity to fight it.
A US official told Senate committee staff in a private interview that the programme was intended as an intimidation strategy and a costly deterrent aimed at pressuring migrants to drop asylum claims, according to the report.
Destinations such as Palau, a Pacific island nation, or eSwatini, a kingdom in southern Africa, were selected in part to signal that migrants could be sent to remote locations far from home, the official said.
The bulk of the money went to five countries – Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, El Salvador, Palau and eSwatini – which collectively received US$32 million.
The funds were transferred directly to foreign governments rather than through third-party implementing partners, and the State Department was not using outside auditors to track how the money was spent, the report’s authors said.
People hold up photos of relatives who were deported from the US to a prison in El Salvador outside El Salvador’s embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 2, 2025. Photo: AP
Equatorial Guinea, which ranks 172 out of 182 countries in Transparency International’s corruption index, received US$7.5 million – more than the total American foreign aid provided to the country over the previous eight years combined, according to the report.
The report detailed specific examples in which migrants were sent to countries far from their home nation.
A Mexican national, for instance, was flown more than 13,000km (8,000 miles) to South Sudan at an estimated cost of US$91,000 per person, including housing at a US military base in Djibouti along the way.
He was sent back to Mexico weeks later. President Claudia Sheinbaum said her government was not informed of the deportation, according to the report.
A Jamaican national was sent to eSwatini at an estimated cost of more than US$181,000, despite having deportation orders to Jamaica. Weeks later, the US again paid to fly him home. Jamaican officials said they had not refused his return, the report’s authors added.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment about the report.
Separately, the Trump administration is moving ahead with a US$38.3 billion plan to remake the US immigration detention system, in a sweeping expansion that officials say will streamline operations and speed deportations.
The plan, known as the Detention Reengineering Initiative, calls for acquiring and renovating eight large-scale detention centres, adding 16 processing sites and taking control of 10 existing “turnkey” facilities where Immigration and Customs Enforcement already operates.
Several African nations, including Uganda, Rwanda, eSwatini, formerly known as Swaziland, and South Sudan, have agreed to accept US-deported migrants, many with no ties to Africa.
Courtesy of BBC