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State of Deportations

As Trump bends more of the federal government to focus on expelling migrants, the bleeding-heart foreign service officers of the State Department are finding themselves pulled into a project they never signed up for: deport, deport, deport.

ICE raids
Deporting migrants to a third country is not new. Detainees released from Guantánamo were often sent to third countries, for example. But the Trump administration has been using the tactic in unprecedented ways. Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Julia Ioffe
September 25, 2025

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On September 5, 14 West African migrants who were being held in an ICE detention facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, were taken from their cells in the middle of the night. Then, according to a complaint filed in D.C. District Court by five of them, they were put on a military cargo plane bound for Ghana, even though none of them had Ghanaian citizenship or any connections to the country. During the flight, some of them were allegedly forced to sit in straitjackets for 16 hours and given nothing to eat but bread and water.