US paid $32m to five countries to accept about 300 deportees, report shows

The Trump administration has spent more than $1m per person to deport some migrants to countries they have no connection to, only to see many sent back to their home nations at further taxpayer expense, according to a new congressional investigation.

A 30-page report from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats, released on Thursday and shared with the Guardian, details how the US government paid more than $32m to five foreign governments – including some of the world’s most corrupt regimes – to accept approximately 300 third-country nationals deported from the US.

In the most extreme case, the administration paid Rwanda $7.5m plus an estimated $601,864 in flight costs to accept just seven people – about $1.1m per individual, according to the report’s analysis of government spending data and flight records. The administration similarly paid Equatorial Guinea $7.5m to take 29 people, costing taxpayers an estimated $282,126 per person. Palau was paid $7.5m with no documented flights, Eswatini was paid $5.1m for 15 people, and El Salvador $4.76m for about 250 people.

Committee staff indicated the state department is pursuing third-country deportation agreements with 70 to 80 countries. More than 80% of migrants sent to these third countries have already returned to their home nations or are in the process of doing so, the investigation found, raising the question as to why they were not deported directly in the first place.

“The Trump administration is sometimes paying the country to take people, flying them there and then paying to take them to their home country. It doesn’t make sense,” one current US official told committee staff, according to the report, which is the first of its kind under the second Trump administration.

“This is a scare tactic for them be able to tell people here in the US: if you don’t self deport, you could get sent to South Sudan. You could get sent to Eswatini,” a member of the committee told the Guardian. “I really think that that is a huge driving factor, both for the pace and the way in which they’ve been carrying this out.”

The practice has resulted in the US government paying twice for some deportees’ travel. In one case, a Jamaican national was sent to the southern African nation of Eswatini at an estimated cost of more than $181,000, only to be flown back to Jamaica on US-funded flights weeks later. The Jamaican government publicly stated it had “not refused the return of any of our nationals,” contradicting administration claims that third countries are only used when home governments refuse to accept deportees back.

“We spent so much of last year hearing about how we have to cut waste, we have to cut spending,” said the member. “We’re not spending millions of dollars on foreign assistance, on health saving dollars for childcare and maternity health and diseases and epidemics and famine around the world, but we are spending it on this.”

The administration has defended the removals by claiming it must send migrants to third countries when they are “so uniquely barbaric that their own countries won’t take them back,” as the Department of Homeland Security wrote in a June press release.

But the report documents multiple cases where home governments were willing to accept their nationals or were never properly contacted.

Court filings show that in several instances, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not request travel documents from home countries or failed to give governments sufficient time to process the paperwork. Mexico’s president said her government was never informed before a Mexican national was deported to South Sudan, the second most corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International.

The report identifies a lack of oversight for the millions of dollars sent to foreign governments, several of which have documented records of corruption and human rights abuses. Equatorial Guinea, which received $7.5m to accept 29 people, ranks 172nd out of 182 countries for corruption according to Transparency International. The payment exceeds all US assistance provided to the country over the previous eight years combined.

Despite these red flags, there is no evidence the state department is monitoring how the funds are being used. The department appears to be relying on the foreign governments themselves to report on spending, rather than using independent auditors that typically oversee US assistance.

In the case of El Salvador, which received at least $4.76m, more than 250 Venezuelans were sent from the US and detained at the CECOT prison, where Human Rights Watch has documented credible reports of torture. The administration also returned several MS-13 gang leaders who had been serving as US informants, undermining a long-running federal investigation, according to the report.

The investigation reveals the administration has pursued these arrangements through opaque negotiations involving political concessions or pressure tactics. South Sudan requested sanctions relief on government officials and US investment in oil and gas in exchange for accepting just eight deportees.

Perhaps most controversially, the administration has struck a deal with Iran to deport 400 Iranian nationals, including Christian converts, ethnic minorities, and political dissidents. At least eight people on the first flight begged not to be sent because they feared for their lives.

“One man says he attempted suicide at a US detention facility in an attempt to avoid being sent back to Iran but was still deported,” the report reads.

The report also raises concerns the administration may be using third countries to circumvent US immigration law. Since September 2025, the majority of migrants flown to third countries had US court-ordered protections, meaning the US could not legally send them to their home countries due to the likelihood they would face persecution, torture or death. Yet within days of arriving in Ghana and Equatorial Guinea, many were sent back anyway.

A federal district judge, reviewing removals to Ghana, said in September: “These actions also appear to be part of a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.”

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democrat on the foreign relations committee, wrote in the report’s introduction: “At a time when the Administration is already straining its relationships with longstanding allies, it is building transactional relationships with corrupt and adversarial regimes – not around shared interests or strategic goals, but opaque deals that do not serve American taxpayers or American security.”

The Guardian has approached the state department for comment on the concerns raised in the report.