While third-country deportations are not new, they were historically rare and limited. Under Trump’s first term, the U.S. deported a small number of Salvadorans and Hondurans to Guatemala. The Biden administration, while criticized for its own handling of immigration, struck regional agreements to manage migrant flows — including allowing Mexico to accept thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans under specific terms. What’s changed now, advocates say, is both the scale and the speed. The memo requires ICE officers to provide “reasonable means and opportunity” for a detainee to speak with a lawyer, but Amaran says that’s far from reality. “They say the person can talk to an attorney — but the system to actually make that happen doesn’t work. ICE routinely ignores scheduled calls. You can’t get a judge to rule on anything in six hours,” she said. “The deck is completely stacked.”
