The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently released a report with an ominous title: “At What Cost? Inside the Trump Administration’s Secret Deportation Deals.”
Buried inside it is a portrait of a largely hidden policy, one that has quietly paid foreign governments millions of dollars to take migrants the United States government doesn’t want here.
The details are stranger — and darker — than many people may realize.
Here are five of the most unsettling findings:
Deportations cost more than $1 million per person
The shadowy deportation program is extraordinarily expensive relative to the number of migrants involved — the committee says it likely totaled upward of $40 million through January. Aka, the administration has spent a huge amount of money to deport only a few hundred people to more than 20 third countries, according to the report.
In some cases, the government has paid more than $1 million per person, the committee says.
And some countries have received large upfront payments simply for agreeing to participate.
For example:
Rwanda: $7.5 million
Equatorial Guinea: $7.5 million
Palau: $7.5 million
Eswatini: $5.1 million
El Salvador: $4.76 million
Flights themselves are expensive. The report says deportation flights have sometimes occurred on military aircraft costing more than $32,000 per hour. “In total,” the authors write, “the Trump administration spent an estimated more than $7.2 million on third-country deportation flights as of January 2026 to at least 10 countries, with actual costs likely far higher.”
The ‘double deportation’ problem
One incredibly bizarre side to the deportation program: Many migrants have eventually ended up in their home countries despite being sent to third countries first. The report found that more than 80 percent of the migrants sent to third countries have already been sent onward to their country of origin. In some cases, the committee says, the Trump administration didn’t even bother to contact those countries of origin before deporting people to third countries.
All this means that taxpayers have sometimes funded two deportations for the same person.
The report describes cases where the U.S. paid to fly migrants to third countries only to later pay again for another deportation, meaning people were sometimes flown thousands of miles to a third country and then they were quietly sent on to their home country after that.
Which raises the obvious question: Why not send them home in the first place?
Millions sent to corrupt and unstable governments
Another striking detail is where the money has gone.
The United States transferred more than $32 million directly to foreign governments involved in the deals. And some of these foreign governments have terrible records of corruption, human rights abuses and human trafficking — look at El Salvador and South Sudan, for instance.
And it appears that this is deliberate. Sending migrants to countries like Eswatini is meant to be dangerous; “the point is that the administration can threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere,” a U.S. official reportedly told the Senate committee, CNN reported.
“The point is to scare people,” the official said.
Just look at the more than 250 Venezuelans who landed in El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, with its terrible overcrowding and reports of deaths and torture.
Not only has the U.S. sometimes lost track of the people it has sent to third countries, the report says the U.S. government has often relied on the recipient governments themselves to use the money they were given however they want with little or no monitoring.
A State Department official could not confirm to the Senate committee how U.S. funds are being used.
Officials not checking what happens to deportees
Perhaps the most disturbing passage in the report concerns what happens after migrants arrive in third countries.
In theory, third-country agreements include promises about humane treatment. But, as with funds, monitoring is weak or nonexistent. The report says that the State Department is not tracking agreements made about how deportees should be treated — meaning the U.S. often relies only on diplomatic assurances from potentially corrupt partner governments rather than verifying conditions on the ground.
“The Trump administration’s failure to monitor compliance with these agreements raises serious concerns that the United States may be indirectly facilitating torture, arbitrary detention or other human rights abuses,” according to the committee.
And not only is the U.S. “turning a blind eye” to what happens to migrants in third countries, the potential for abuse looks to be a condition chosen on purpose, aka the administration is dropping off migrants in dangerous places “to circumvent U.S. laws,” the senators say. As in, what happens in CECOT stays in CECOT.
Secret deals — including with adversarial regimes
Finally, the report says that agreements have been negotiated behind closed doors with foreign governments, often with little public disclosure and sometimes with geopolitical rivals like Iran.
These deals sometimes involve cash payments, political concessions, pressure and what the committee calls “sweeteners.” The pressure may include threats of tariffs, a cut in financial assistance or visa bans.
Basically, immigration enforcement is being used as a bargaining chip in foreign policy.
No ‘measurable impact’
Taken together, the system is nothing less than abusive. To sum up: The U.S. pays millions to foreign governments, flies migrants thousands of miles away to what may be dangerous places, sometimes deports migrants twice, and does not check what happens to them after deportation.
All for a program that, according to the report, makes “no measurable impact” on the administration’s Orwellian deportation goals.
“Taxpayers,” the committee says, “are funding a global deportation network that is little more than an expensive deterrent with no measurable benefit.”
The scheme is part of a dark network of deals — part diplomacy, part deterrence strategy and part bureaucratic experiment.
And the full implications of it are still emerging.
horrifying.
It would seem that many of the deported have been sent to what Trump has previously called “shithole” countries. Instead of sending them to their home countries, it would seem that the intent was to further punish these people just because he could, regardless of the expense. The cruelty of this program is just another example of Trump’s racism and disdain for people that he considers to be of lesser value.