The Trump administration is intensifying efforts to deport people to countries where they have no connections.
Last month, lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security filed almost 5,000 motions to dismiss asylum cases and force applicants to seek protection elsewhere, a staggering increase from the few hundred such motions filed each month this summer.
The surge, documented in an analysis of public immigration court data, comes as federal officials have been working out new asylum agreements with a handful of nations, including Honduras and Uganda. Under these “safe third country” accords, foreign governments are offering to take in limited numbers of asylum seekers from the United States, promising that the U.S. deportees will be able to apply for asylum in those nations instead.
In immigration courts across the country, government lawyers are now increasingly asking judges to “pretermit,” or dismiss, asylum cases without hearings, asserting that applicants can seek asylum in those “safe third countries.”
Judges appear receptive to the requests, according to the court data analysis. In November, at least 230 asylum seekers who were not citizens of Honduras were ordered expelled to Honduras, as compared with 40 such people in October and one in September.
Homeland Security officials say the process will allow people to pursue asylum claims in countries where they do not fear persecution. “D.H.S. is using every lawful tool available to address the backlog and abuse of the asylum system,” the agency said in a statement.
In some cases, an immigrant may be subject to multiple motions, and D.H.S. officials have told agency prosecutors across the country that they should list as many third-country agreements as possible for a given immigrant, according to agency guidance obtained by The New York Times.
But as this practice has been expanded, it has been coming under more scrutiny, with deportation to Uganda, more than 7,000 miles from Washington, faulted by some immigration lawyers as unduly harsh.
On Friday, D.H.S. lawyers were issued a new directive that motions seeking deportation to Uganda could be filed only for immigrants from most other African nations, according to the document obtained by The Times. For motions to Uganda that had already been filed, it instructed lawyers to “expeditiously move to withdraw” them. That included the high-profile case of Heng Guan, the Chinese national who sought asylum in the United States after recording the surveillance of Uyghurs.
Lawyers who represent immigrants and scholars who study the asylum system called the motions the latest attempt to dismantle international human rights protections that President Trump has denounced as a “scam.”
In the federal lawsuit filed during the first Trump administration and resurrected in September, several asylum seekers and immigrant rights groups contend that the third-country asylum agreements are unlawful and an attempt to shirk the United States’ international obligations.
For decades, a person who enters the United States and seeks asylum has been allowed to live and work in the country while the case moves through an overburdened and underfunded court system.
But with fewer and fewer legal pathways to enter the United States, asylum claims have proliferated in recent years. The backlog now totals almost four million cases, and wait times for hearings have tended to span about four years and in some cases longer. That in turn has made the asylum system a target for critics from across the political spectrum. They argue the broken system incentivizes migrants with claims that have little or no merit under international law to use the form of relief as the surest path to remain in the country for at least several years.
In his first term in office, Mr. Trump, a vocal skeptic of asylum seekers, began an almost methodical approach to dismantling the asylum process. In 2024, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. prevented migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border after crossings at the border reached record heights, a policy that led those numbers to later drastically drop.
Since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, his administration has taken its most aggressive actions against the system yet. It has directed Homeland Security lawyers to request the dismissal of asylum cases en masse. It has urged immigration judges to deny relief without holding hearings. It has put all pending asylum applications on hold.
Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the asylum system had long been due for a reckoning because of the pressures it has been under for generations. But accelerating dismissals of asylum cases is a misguided way to address the backlog, he added. The administration has been pursuing the fast-track strategy while simultaneously underfunding the system, he said, meaning fewer resources to ensure petitioners are having their cases fairly resolved.
“Efficiency is one goal, but so is accuracy, and you can be very efficient but be very inaccurate,” he said.
The analysis that showed the surge in dismissal motions for asylum seekers was conducted by Joseph Gunther, an independent mathematician, and Brandon Marrow, a civic technologist, who teamed up to analyze immigration court data as part of an effort to make the asylum process more transparent. Their research is shared on a website that Mr. Marrow created to provide free immigration court insights for lawyers.
The analysis showed that Homeland Security lawyers began filing motions to dismiss in hundreds of cases in Omaha over the summer, shortly after the administration signed new asylum agreements with Guatemala and Uganda. The practice took off in November after the Board of Immigration Appeals — the Justice Department body that reviews rulings from immigration courts and sets their policies — overturned a judge’s ruling in one of those asylum cases and delivered a decisive victory for the Department of Homeland Security.
Under that decision, immigration judges are instructed to consider whether to dismiss asylum cases without hearings on the grounds that immigrants can instead be sent to other countries to pursue relief there. The United States has had such an agreement with its close ally and neighbor Canada for more than two decades. But the new agreements are with a host of less stable nations: Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras, all of which have endured high levels of gang violence, and Uganda, which has a checkered human rights record and borders conflict regions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
For months, the Trump administration has been deporting migrants to troubled nations such as South Sudan, and to the tiny African monarchy of Eswatini. But the newer “safe third country” agreements are different in that they require that deportees from the United States be afforded access to a bona fide asylum process.
It remains unclear how many people the government will ultimately be able to deport to Uganda and elsewhere. Yet in courts, asylum seekers are already seeing their cases upturned.
Immigration lawyers say they are being given little notice of the new government motions and have not received copies of the third-country agreements, making it difficult to identify potential exceptions for their clients.
The board’s decision has left some asylum seekers and their lawyers to try to assess risks for several countries at once. “People are now in a position of having to show they fear persecution in five countries at the same time,” said Keren Zwick, a lawyer with the National Immigrant Justice Center, one of the groups that filed suit against the administration over its use of third-country agreements.
In an interview, Mauro, 43, an asylum seeker in Virginia, said he fled Ecuador and applied for U.S. asylum in 2023. He said he had been tortured and threatened with death by political operatives. But a day before his final hearing this November, his lawyers were notified that the U.S. government wants to send him to Honduras instead. Now, he and his lawyer are preparing to argue that he would fear persecution there as well.
“I’ve always believed that the United States is the only country where the values of free speech and democracy prevail, the only country where asylum is truly granted,” said Mauro, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation from his persecutors.
At 26 Federal Plaza, the federal building that has become the epicenter of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in New York City, the new fast-track strategy was evident this past week in the churn of cases going before judges in immigration courts.
In at least three courtrooms over two mornings this past week, Homeland Security lawyers in nearly all asylum cases moved to dismiss their cases and asked that immigrants be removed to any of the countries with asylum agreements, beginning with Uganda.
In Judge Karen Nazaire-Francois’ courtroom, some lawyers objected, to which she responded that she had little say in the matter.
“I cannot make a decision on whether or not I think it’s fair or legal,” Judge Nazaire-Francois said, citing the recent board of appeals decision ramping up the motions. “I have no choice under the board’s decision,” she added.
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.
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