Can the Government Deport You to a Country Other Than Your Own?

The Legal Basis for Removing Someone to a Third Country

Removal law has always contemplated that a person's home country will not always be the destination. Under INA § 241(b)(2), if a country will not accept a removed person, or if removal there is otherwise not practical, the statute allows DHS to designate an alternative country. This has existed for years in a narrow, largely administrative form. What changed is how aggressively and how quickly the government began using it, particularly for people from countries with strained diplomatic relationships or countries that simply refuse to issue travel documents for their own nationals.

The Supreme Court Order That Changed the Landscape

In June 2025, the Supreme Court decided DHS v. D.V.D., and the practical effect was significant. A federal district court had entered a preliminary injunction requiring DHS to give people meaningful notice and a real opportunity to raise a fear of harm before removing them to a third country. The Supreme Court granted the government's request to stay that injunction while the underlying appeal proceeded, which allowed DHS to resume third-country removals without those protections in the interim. Justice Sotomayor's dissent, joined by two other justices, was blunt about what this meant on the ground: people were being put on planes to countries they had never lived in, with little to no chance to explain why that specific country was dangerous for them.

The story did not end there. In February 2026, the same district court, after further proceedings, declared the government's third-country removal policy unlawful and set it aside again, holding that DHS cannot remove someone to a country not named in their original proceedings without written notice and a genuine opportunity to seek protection from harm in that specific country. That ruling has since been stayed by the First Circuit pending an expedited appeal, so as of now it stands as persuasive authority rather than binding law nationwide. What this means practically is that the protections exist on paper and in one court's reasoning, but they are not automatically guaranteed in every case. Whether you actually get notice and a real chance to raise a fear claim before being sent to an unfamiliar country often depends on whether someone fights for it in your specific case, not on a settled, uniform rule.

What an Asylum Cooperative Agreement Actually Is

An Asylum Cooperative Agreement, or ACA, is a different mechanism from ordinary third-country removal, and it is worth not confusing the two. Rather than removing someone with an already-final order, an ACA lets the United States transfer an asylum seeker to a partner country to pursue protection there instead of having their claim adjudicated here, on the theory that the partner country is a safe place to seek asylum. The United States has signed several of these agreements with a growing list of countries. One, signed with Uganda in mid-2025, allows transfers of asylum seekers who are not unaccompanied minors, and includes a provision that Uganda will not return someone to their home country until their protection claim there is resolved. In practice, outcomes for people transferred under this specific agreement have already been mixed, with some individuals granted protection, some leaving the country on their own, and at least one case of someone being sent back toward their home country regardless.

The legal premise behind every ACA is that the receiving country is safe for that particular person. That premise is rebuttable, and rebutting it is exactly where a case can be won or lost.

A Case I Fought Over This Exact Issue

I represented a client, from a country I will not name here to protect his identity, whose asylum case had real strength on its merits. Rather than proceeding to a hearing on that claim, the government moved to have him removed to Uganda under the ACA framework, treating it as close to a formality. I did not accept that. I filed motions opposing the transfer, laid out specific, individualized evidence of why Uganda itself, not just his home country, presented a genuine danger to someone in his exact circumstances, and argued that the safe-third-country premise the government was relying on simply did not hold up against the facts of his case.

It was not a quick or easy fight. There were multiple rounds of briefing, and I had to argue directly to the judge that pretermitting the case, or treating the ACA bar as automatically satisfied, would deny my client the hearing the law still requires when the safety of the receiving country is genuinely disputed. The judge agreed. My client got his full hearing rather than a summary transfer, and that outcome was not guaranteed going in. It came from building a specific, well-documented record of individualized risk, not from a general objection to the policy.

This account describes a case pattern from my own practice, with identifying details, including my client's nationality, altered or omitted so that no individual is identifiable. It is not a description of any specific matter beyond what is stated here.

The New BIA Precedent That Makes This Harder in Every Asylum Case

Third-country removal and ACA transfers are not the only way a case can be cut short before a full hearing. In 2025 and 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a set of precedent decisions that give immigration judges much broader authority to end an asylum case on the papers, without ever holding an evidentiary hearing.

The central case is Matter of H-A-A-V-, 29 I&N Dec. 233 (BIA 2025). The Board held that an immigration judge may pretermit an application for asylum, withholding of removal, or protection under the Convention Against Torture, without a full hearing, if the facts alleged, taken as true and viewed in the light most favorable to the applicant, still do not establish a reasonable likelihood of eligibility. Nexus to one of the five protected grounds, race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group, is very often exactly where these motions succeed. If the government's attorney can show that even a completely accepted version of your facts does not connect the harm you fear to one of those grounds, the case can be pretermitted before you ever testify.

Two related decisions extend this further. Matter of C-I-G-M- & L-V-S-G-, 29 I&N Dec. 291 (BIA 2025), held that an immigration judge erred by denying a government motion to pretermit an asylum claim based specifically on the ACA bar, reinforcing that the same taken-as-true framework applies to third-country agreement issues, not just nexus. And Matter of T-A-G-, 29 I&N Dec. 715 (BIA 2026), closed off a separate argument some practitioners had been raising, holding that an immigration judge cannot deny a pretermission motion simply because the respondent has a separate, pending application for relief, such as a family-based petition, working its way through the system elsewhere.

The Board has said this does not violate due process, reasoning that a respondent who has counsel, receives notice of the motion, and gets a real chance to submit evidence and legal argument in response has been meaningfully heard, even without live testimony. That may be legally sufficient, but it also means the written response to a pretermission motion has become one of the most consequential documents in the entire case. There is often no second chance to make the record better once the judge rules on the papers.

What This Actually Means If You're Facing One of These Motions

If DHS moves to pretermit your asylum case, whether on nexus grounds, an ACA bar, or both, the response cannot be a general denial or a request for more time to think about it. It has to affirmatively show, with specific facts and, ideally, supporting evidence already in the record, exactly how your circumstances connect to a protected ground, or exactly why the country the government wants to send you to is not actually safe for you individually. General country conditions are not enough on their own. The individualized connection between you and the risk is what the Board's own framework is asking for, and it is also what actually persuades a judge to grant a hearing instead of cutting the case short.

If you are facing a third-country removal or an ACA transfer specifically, that same principle applies. General skepticism about a country's safety record is not the same as showing why that country is dangerous for you. Build that record early, and build it before a motion forces the issue, if you can.

Why This Is Worth Fighting

Every one of these mechanisms, third-country removal, ACA transfers, and pretermission motions, is designed to move a case forward faster and with less judicial scrutiny than a full hearing. Some of that is legitimate case management in an overloaded system. But speed is not the same as accuracy, and a case that gets pretermitted or transferred without a real look at its specific facts is a case that never got the hearing the law is supposed to guarantee when there is a genuine dispute. The outcome I got for my client came from refusing to treat these motions as a formality, and from building the kind of specific, individualized record that gives a judge a real reason to say no to the government's shortcut.

If you are facing removal to a country other than your own, an Asylum Cooperative Agreement transfer, or a government motion to pretermit your asylum case, contact the Law Offices of Shawn S. Sedaghat at (818) 382-3333.

This article discusses general legal principles. The case example described is a composite drawn from my practice, with identifying details altered or removed so that no individual client is identifiable. Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice or creates an attorney-client relationship. The law in this area, including the status of DHS v. D.V.D. on appeal and the terms of specific Asylum Cooperative Agreements, is actively changing; confirm current requirements before relying on this article.

Shawn S. Sedaghat is an immigration attorney at Law Offices of Shawn S. Sedaghat focused on deportation defense, immigration appeals, asylum, family-based immigration, and employment-based immigration. He is the firm's founder and principal attorney and has more than 30 years of experience handling U.S. immigration matters.