By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
"We cannot leave," one deported man told CBS News. He wasn't talking about a prison. He was talking about a country he'd never set foot in before this year.
The Trump administration has brokered deals with more than 35 countries to accept migrants deported from the United States who have no connection to those nations — a practice known as third-country removal, CBS News reported. Two men described being sent to the Central African Republic, one of the countries the U.S. government has persuaded to take deportees swept up in the president's immigration crackdown, and said they now see no path home or forward.
A separate flight carrying roughly 20 deportees landed in Liberia on Thursday. U.S. officials told CBS News that some passengers refused to get off the plane after it touched down.
This account, including the scope of the third-country removal program and the deportees' statements, rests on CBS News's reporting alone; the Press could not independently confirm the figures.
The administration has not, in what CBS has published, detailed a public accounting of what becomes of people once they arrive — whether they receive documentation, work authorization, or any support in countries where they have no family, language ties, or legal status. That silence is itself worth noting: the policy's defenders describe it as a deterrent and enforcement tool: what it means day to day for the people put on those planes remains, largely, undocumented beyond these firsthand accounts.
This is one strand of a broader deportation push whose full scope — how many people, to how many countries, under what terms — has not been comprehensively laid out in public by the administration.
— Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by CBS News.
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