Weeks after the Central African Republic signed a deportation agreement with the United States, the first planeload of deportees from the US arrived in Bangui, the capital. The deportees, who included Iranian activists and asylum seekers as well as citizens of Jordan, Armenia and Tūrkiye, landed in a country that the State Department advises its own citizens against traveling to “for any reason.”
While local organizations in the Central African Republic may help deportees manage their cases on arrival, one multilateral institution has a large role in working with them: The United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, or IOM.
In a statement, a spokesperson told reporters that the IOM would “provide post-arrival humanitarian assistance” to the deportees. The Geneva-based agency, which marks the 10-year anniversary of its relationship agreement with the UN in July, was reportedly awarded $85 million by the US for its work in the Central African Republic this year. Its boss, Amy Pope, is an American who has been leading the organization since 2023.
Under the second Trump administration, the US has deported approximately 19,000 people to 24 countries in which it has established “third country removal” agreements. Under the deals, many of which have not been disclosed publicly, countries agree to take a certain number of people deported from the US in exchange for money and, presumably, to curry favor with the White House.
In many of these cases, the IOM has helped to manage the deportees’ return to their countries of origin. While the IOM is not supposed to return people to countries where they face danger — a foundational principle of international law, known as non-refoulement — some critics say the IOM has been complicit in enabling a deportation system that endangers vulnerable migrants.
South Sudan, test case
One of the first countries to receive US deportees under the second Trump administration was South Sudan (the US also warns Americans from traveling there). “That was sort of a test case,” said Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International. Trump administration lawyers, she said, used the case to try out their plan to institute third-country deportations as a broad strategy. It worked. In July 2025, the US Supreme Court allowed third-country deportations to move ahead; today, the US has entered into at least 27 such agreements. (The IOM is not involved in the South Sudan cases.)
The plans take different forms. Sometimes, a third country agrees to imprison deportees sent from the US, as in El Salvador, where in several cases, they were tortured in the country’s brutal CECOT prison. In “safe third country” arrangements, the US displaces asylum seekers from its own territory and sends them to a third country, like Ecuador, where they can apply for asylum instead of from the US.
Many agreements, including those with Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon, have not been made public — others have been recovered through lawsuits and freedom of information requests. Some agreements arrange for payments to the host countries: Rwanda, $7.5 million; Eswatini $5.1 million. Other governments are incentivized by the threat of tariffs, visa revocations or continuing to receive US aid.
Many deportees have no criminal records, yet are deported anyway; many have active asylum cases. Some of those people who are caught in the web of immigration enforcement have relinquished their cases and accepted deportation to the countries to which they had originally fled rather than risk deportation to countries they do not know.
The Trump administration is reportedly talking with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to deport 1,100 Afghans brought to Qatar under a resettlement program for Afghans who worked with the US military during the war and include interpreters and Afghan veterans. The eastern half of the DRC is grappling with a deadly Ebola outbreak amid a war between the Congolese military and Rwanda-backed militias.
Third-country deportations, or removals, represent a small fraction of the US’ own unverified estimates of total people deported in 2025. The Department of Homeland Security claims it deported over 605,000 people last year, and, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nongovernmental organization, around 15,000 third-country deportations occurred over the same period. Generally, however, the agreements involve only a few hundred deportees, except for Mexico, which has accepted around 13,000.
IOM’s role
Third-country deportation agreements have been criticized for their opacity and for enabling the US to mass-deport and “disappear” people to countries to which they have no ties; that may be thousands of miles away from their home countries; and often have questionable human rights records. South Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, El Salvador and the Central African Republic all fit the latter bill.
In many instances, the IOM has been closely involved in these agreements, though the full extent is unknown because many deals have not been made public. In 2020, the IOM stopped publishing detailed data on the returns it facilitates, although, according to its website, it organized the repatriation of 81,000 people worldwide (not all of them were deported from the US) in 2025.
The IOM’s involvement in deportations falls along two paths: Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR), in which migrants are returned to their countries of origin, and Post-Arrival Assistance, to help newly returned people.
But while the IOM claims to promote “the rights and dignity of each of each individual we work with,” human rights advocates have long criticized the agency’s involvement in deportations.
The nature of the IOM’s structure and its relationship with the UN opens up additional vulnerabilities, said Ian Kysel, an associate professor of law at Cornell University and director of its Transnational Disputes Clinic. It is part of several coalitions representing migrants who have sued African and Central American countries over their treatment under deportation agreements with the US.
“The way the Trump administration has leveraged the IOM in the context of these agreements has just exacerbated those vulnerabilities dramatically,” Kysel said. “The IOM doesn’t have the kind of centralized budgeting structure like UNHCR does to allow it to have big programmatic investments around protection.” He was referring to the UN Refugee Agency, which is also based in Geneva and is a neighbor of IOM. Both compete for international funding.
Without a normative treaty mandate or clear rights or due diligence requirements in its Relationship Agreement to the UN, he added, the IOM is not held by its 174 member states to the same stringency of rights obligations as is UNHCR. (IOM says on its website that its “overarching goal is to ensure the protection, respect and fulfilment of the rights and well-being of migrants.”)
For years, the IOM has received funding from the European Union to manage so-called voluntary returns and reintegration of migrants in their home countries. But in February 2025, an investigation by a Gambian news publication found that the IOM’s reintegration program was “poorly managed, often subjecting returnees to long months of waiting before they can access support.”
Libya stands out
The IOM also collaborates with institutions that have been criticized for their human rights records. In January, the agency highlighted its work with Libyan Border Guards, who are notorious for torturing, sexually abusing and extorting detainees as well as open-firing on migrant vessels.
In a press release, Nicoletta Giordano, IOM’s Libya chief of mission, announced the agency’s readiness to “further expand its technical support on border management” in collaboration with Libyan authorities.
The IOM’s repatriations from Libya are funded by the EU, which has direct interests in preventing migration to the continent and has invested heavily in the externalization of its borders, including paying local militias and warlords as well as the abusive Libyan Coast Guard to detain migrants.
In 2022, a report by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) found that the IOM was not sufficiently protecting migrants returning from Libya to countries elsewhere across Africa and in Asia, including assisting them in applying for asylum in safe countries. In the report, experts raised questions about migrants’ ability to fully consent to these returns.
Migrants, the report found, are “virtually compelled to accept assisted return because they are effectively denied access to safe and regular protection pathways, including asylum. Collectively, these conditions have created a coercive environment that is often inconsistent with free choice.”
“People feel pressured to accept AVRR, especially if you’re sent to a country where you know nobody and don’t speak the language,” Schacher of Refugees International said. “People just feel completely desperate. They don’t feel like they have any choices.”
The IOM-enabled and EU-funded returns from Libya continue. In June 2026, the IOM facilitated the return of 182 Nigerians, including unaccompanied children, from Libya.
In a statement, an unnamed IOM spokesperson told PassBlue: “IOM operates strictly within the legal frameworks and agreements established by participating governments and does not make or influence decisions related to deportation, admission, or immigration status. Our priority in all contexts is to ensure safety, dignity, and well-being, in line with our mandate.”
Some advocates question the categorization of these returns as “voluntary.”
“My big question is, well, if this is all assisted voluntary return then why didn’t IOM just do it from the United States?” Schacher said. “Obviously, it’s not voluntary because people are being forcibly deported to a third country.”
On the IOM’s website, an FAQ about the AVR program addresses the question of voluntariness: “IOM acknowledges that a significant proportion of migrants considering AVRR face constrained circumstances. . . . IOM’s role is not to ignore those constraints, which are determined by governments and national law, but to ensure that within them, the person has accurate information and that the decision to seek IOM’s support is genuinely their own — not the result of pressure, misinformation, or coercion.”
African cases
In recent months, new questions of deportees’ ability to consent have emerged. The IOM has been involved in voluntary returns from several African countries for people deported from the US. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the IOM reportedly gave a group of 14 deported migrants a deadline of seven days to decide if they wanted to stay in the country or to be deported to their home countries.
In Cameroon, which has received dozens of deportees from the US, the IOM helped a deported Moroccan asylum seeker, a gay woman, return to Morocco. She had originally fled from violence there and sought asylum in the US, but after she was deported to Cameroon, where homosexuality is illegal, she decided to accept the IOM’s offer to return to Morocco.
She is currently in hiding there, according to a human rights lawyer, Joseph Fru, who is representing several US deportees currently detained in Cameroon.
At the time of the woman’s return to Morocco, Fru said, he was concerned by the IOM’s speed in sending her back there as well as its refusal, he said, to allow her to meet with legal counsel before she was sent. (An IOM spokesperson denied that the agency refused to allow the Moroccan woman access to a lawyer.)
“I think that as an agency of the United Nations, they should have had the expertise to know or had reason to know that was wrong,” he said, citing the principle of nonrefoulement. (The IOM website affirms its commitment to nonrefoulement.)
“We are dealing with matters of life and death,” Fru added. “These persecutions are not artificial. These are not imaginary. These are not people who are just escaping from poverty. These are people who have their lives on the line.
Recent reporting revealed that the Trump administration withheld $30 million in UNHCR funds to Cameroon until its government agreed to accept US deportees.
The IOM is not involved, however, in all third-country deportations in Africa.
In November 2025, the first deportation flight from the US arrived in Equatorial Guinea, carrying nine people from the countries of Georgia, Mauritania, Angola, Ghana and Eritrea. They had all been granted humanitarian protection in the US before their deportation. According to Third Country Deportation Watch, an nonprofit group, the deportees were detained by immigration authorities in the US, then told they would be transferred to a different detention facility within the country — until, instead, they found themselves getting off the plane in Equatorial Guinea.
The US is “targeting people who have been granted protection for removal to a third country,” Schacher said. In effect, she added, the US offloads its responsibilities to provide protection under the Refugee Convention by deporting people to third countries. Those countries, unable or unwilling to offer asylum and bound by their agreements to the US, are themselves pulled into violating the Refugee Convention by repatriating the deportees, opening the possibility for lawsuits by human rights advocates, which have been filed across Africa.
In recent months, the Global Strategic Litigation Council, alongside several African and international human rights legal groups, has organized the African Coalition Against Externalization to combat the Trump administration’s use of third-country deportations to Africa.
In early June, the group filed a lawsuit on behalf of 14 deportees against the government of Equatorial Guinea before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, seeking to improve detention conditions and force the country to halt further deportations from the US.
Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich coastal country in West Africa, has been widely cited for its human rights abuses, including arbitrary detention, torture and killings of dissenters by the ruling authoritarian regime, according to reporting by PassBlue.
Beatrice Njeri, a human rights lawyer with the Global Strategic Litigation Council, one of the groups suing the government, said that most of the deportees to Equatorial Guinea — all of whom had ongoing asylum claims or humanitarian status in the US — received no information about where they were going when they boarded the plane from the US.
“Most of them thought they were being taken to another detention facility within the US, only to then land in Equatorial Guinea,” she told PassBlue.
Since arriving in Malabo, a major city in Equatorial Guinea, several months ago, Njeri said, the deportees have been detained in unsafe conditions in a hotel, unable to leave. They have limited access to sanitary supplies, have been served rotten food and have fallen ill and not received medical care. Only one detainee was allowed to see a lawyer, she said.
Some deportees, Njeri told PassBlue, have attempted to file for asylum in Equatorial Guinea, but “their requests for asylum have gone unresponded to.” Some guards in the hotel, she added, have told detainees that they will not receive asylum and that they will leave the hotel once they are deported to their countries of origin.
Njeri added that some detainees have already been deported to their home countries in Central Africa, like Cameroon, where they live in hiding, having fled the country originally for political, religious or gender- or sexuality-based reasons.
The coalition has filed Freedom of Information petitions to access the text of the Equatorial Guinea agreement, which has not been disclosed. A February 2026 minority report from the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations found that the Trump administration had made a $7.5 million payment to the government of Equatorial Guinea to accept the deportees. The payment, the report noted, is “an amount that far exceeds all U.S. foreign assistance provided to the country over the last eight years combined.”
While the IOM is not directly involved in the Equatorial Guinea deportations, the UN Human Rights Office issued a statement in mid-May, voicing concern that the detainees in Malabo were at risk of being deported to dangerous third countries and urging the government to collaborate with UN agencies, including the IOM.
“International cooperation on migration and asylum must not come at the expense of fundamental human rights,” the statement said. “We are . . . concerned that these developments appear to reflect broader trends of migration externalisation arrangements involving transfers of migrants, asylum seekers and persons in need of international protection to third countries, including African States, without sufficient human rights safeguards.”
On June 29, the coalition filed an Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) lawsuit against Ghana on behalf of 27 asylum seekers who were returned to their home countries after being deported to Ghana. Most plaintiffs were moved to countries they had previously fled from, the lawsuit alleges, and “many now remain in hiding in their home countries or have fled to third countries where they wait in limbo, with no legal protections.”
The lawsuit asserts that Ghanaian officials have “linked the arrangement to the lifting of US visa restrictions on Ghana, which were removed after agreement was negotiated.”
Latin America cases
The IOM has been involved in several agreements in Latin America, including Panama and Costa Rica, where deportees with no criminal records have been held.
In Panama, an April 2025 Human Rights Watch report described the IOM’s repatriation process of almost 300 deportees as “coercive” — and advised the IOM to “refrain from promoting repatriation under coercive circumstances in which the only alternative option is deportation, since such repatriation cannot be regarded as voluntary.”
But the IOM is not involved in all third-country deportations from the US to Latin America as well. In Mexico, for example, thousands of Cubans, many of whom have lived in the US for decades, have been bused across the Mexican border.
A May 2026 Human Rights Watch report found that the US deported almost 13,000 third-country nationals to Mexico from January 2025 to March 2026. Almost 4,500 of the deportees were Cubans, who for years were not the focus of US immigration enforcement. Thousands of them have been moved to Tapachula, in Chiapas, where they — like Haitians, as PassBlue has previously reported — face extraordinary delays in processing their cases.
Alcira Silva Hava, the author of the Human Rights Watch report, told PassBlue that Cubans deported from the US are being funneled into an overburdened immigration system in Mexico. While the IOM has been involved in voluntary-return programs of thousands of asylum seekers in Mexico since at least 2018, Silva Hava said the IOM has not been working with the deported Cubans.
Mexico’s reasons for accepting US deportees are not clear, Silva Hava added, especially when the text of the agreement is not made public. “We don’t really know,” she said. But given Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s pressure to avoid further US tariffs, accepting deportees may be an appeasement to the Trump administration.
Millions of dollars to IOM
The US continues to sign third-country deportation agreements and funnel millions of dollars to the IOM to enable the deportation process. Critics have referred to the agency’s role in these deportations as “blue washing” — operating under the guise of humanitarian work “while simultaneously carrying out migration control activities on behalf of donor states of the global north,” according to authors of a 2017 study on the IOM’s role in outsourcing migration control in Australia to Indonesia.
Earlier in June, the EU approved a vague but sweeping law to establish “return hubs,” or deportation centers, outside the bloc for migrant deportees from the continent. The law has been widely criticized by human rights organizations for opening the possibility of indefinite detention and for sending migrants to countries to which they have no connection.
While a coalition of 19 EU leaders declared their intention to make “full use” of the law, French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez voiced their strong opposition.
“I don’t know if these are the fundamental principles on which our Europe was built,” Macron said. “I invite you to consider what it is [in practice]: this means that people who do not want to return to their country of origin or who cannot get back to their country of origin will be pushed into a third country, which will accept them in return for money.”
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk also disagreed. “EU States cannot simply outsource their human rights obligations to third States in this context,” he said in a statement on June 20. “International human rights law and refugee law are very clear: no one should be returned to a place where they would be at risk of serious human rights violations or other irreparable harm.”
Indeed, Turk has commented repeatedly on instances of harmful third-country returns affecting US deportees. Specifically, he has pointed out that “some deportations of individuals, including to countries other than their State of origin or with which they have no connection, have been conducted hastily, without properly considering the risks of torture or irreparable harm.” Yet, he has not specifically commented on the UN’s role in some of these returns.
The article was updated to include information clarifying IOM’s policies and to add more details on comments by Volker Turk.
Anna Oakes is an independent journalist based in New York City. She was a post-graduate reporting fellow for the Pulitzer Center in 2025.
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Thank you Anna for this very important contribution. My conclusion is that Amy Pope is doing what our great leader Pope Leo has asked us not to do against migrants and what the United Nations Human Rights Office is asking us not to do with human beings! It is the right time to transform IOM into a division/section of UNHCR for a human, adequate and respectful treatment of refugees and migrants’ issues!!