Deported to a country you've never heard of

0:00We're nearly a year into Donald Trump's second term, and there's been a few surprises. The guy who built a brand around being against regime change in foreign countries, taking over Venezuela and gunning for Greenland. It's a bit surprising to me, got to admit. Don't ask me who's in charge because I'll give you an answer and it'll be very contrary. What does that mean? We're in charge. But one thing Trump has been super clear about is his opposition to asylum. He does not want asylum seekers coming to the U.S. The ones that do come, he's deporting them, often to countries they aren't from, countries they've never even heard of.

0:38Eswatini, South Sudan, Costa Rica. We know nothing about this country. We don't know language. We don't know culture. We don't have a first.

0:48Third country deportations and the end of asylum as we knew it. That's coming up on Today Explained from Vox.

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2:15I'm Miles Bryan, filling in as host today. John Fasile is a senior producer at Snap Judgment from KQED Snap Studios. He got in touch with one asylum seeker deported from the U.S. to a country he did not come from and followed his story for months. So his name is German Smirnov. That's his actual God-given name. I am Russian, but my name is German. German the Russian? German the Russian, yeah. Incredible. German was a fitness coach in St. Petersburg, but after he and his wife had a kid, he needed to make a little extra money. One of his clients was in local politics and suggested that he could make some extra money as a poll worker.

2:58German's job at the polling place was to basically just fill out like stacks of ballots for Vladimir Putin. Just put a mark next to Putin's name. They fraud on the elections and I wanted to reveal it. He decided to film himself filling out ballots and send that video to a friend of his who was connected to the Anti-Corruption Foundation founded by Alexei Navalny, who at that point had been murdered. I thought at the time was a genius at this time that everything went by my plan. It was very exciting moment for me. But he never got the chance to do that because as he was leaving the building, he was stopped by security.

3:43They asked to see his phone and they saw the video. They called the cops. I decided to escape and I just ran to the house. And ran all the way home. He talks to a lawyer who suggests that he leaves the country. And he told me that he had a friend who had been granted asylum in the U.S. And so that seemed like a really good option for him. The family flew to Turkey and then on to Mexico City, where they began the process of requesting asylum. I somehow get the sense this story is not about to end with him, you know, living a happy life with asylum here. What happens? So when they get to Mexico, that's when their problems really start.

4:30The Biden administration was requiring asylum seekers to register for their asylum appointments and their credible fear interviews. So he signed up for an appointment and then they waited almost eight months. In the eight months that they're waiting, of course, the U.S. presidential election happens. Donald Trump has been elected president. The 47th president of the United States. Right before Inauguration Day, so on January 14th, German and his family were notified that they were going to get an asylum interview. January 20th, all of those appointments were canceled. So they're kind of getting desperate.

5:17They decide they're just going to drive up to the border and present themselves for asylum, which they could have done at any point. When we came to the border, a supervisor, I think, a woman, asked us why we came here. I told her, we came here to ask about political asylum. She told, we've got new president. We don't give political asylum anymore. Read the newspapers and something like that. They were immediately placed in detention. They put us into the cell. The temperature was very cold. German was separated from his family. He was placed in a cell with a toilet in the middle of the room, brightly lit, cold, blasted with AC just to keep people uncomfortable.

6:04He was in there with 15 other people sleeping on the floor. Guards would mock and insult them. They had really poor hygiene, poor food. They were in detention for 31 days. German says he lost 25 pounds during that time. And then one night they were woken up, flown to Arizona, then put on another plane, and they were told that plane was headed to Costa Rica. They told us, you're going to Costa Rica. You want it or you don't want it. German's part of a group of 200 migrants, including 81 children, that end up held in an old pencil factory. So it's not clear how long they're going to be held there when they first arrive.

6:51I escaped one prison to get to another. This is a rusty old factory in the jungle. It's hot. It's buggy. German and his family share a small windowless room with eight other people. The feelings every day are the same. A lot of stress, a lot of worries, a lot of fighting with despair. When we first spoke to him, he told us that the conditions were so much better there than they were at the U.S. border. Really? Yeah, the food was better. They had adequate food. They had their phones. They could contact their families. But they just didn't know at that point what was next. Yesterday, it was a very complicated day.

7:36My wife, she began to cry at the cafeteria during the eat because she was tired of all of this situation. And her mother calls her and her relative calls her every day. And in her mind, she is already in Russia. How is this all legal? Like, aren't there rules for asylum when somebody comes to the border and says they fear for their lives or they're in fear of political persecution? Aren't they entitled to some standards of care? This is all legal because deportation is categorized as a civil process, not a criminal one. Basically, deportation is not legally considered a punishment. It's considered a sovereign right of the federal government to deport someone.

8:25And as a result, people in deportation proceedings just don't have the same level of constitutional protection. This idea of deportation as not being punishment is something that an immigration expert described to me as the legal fiction underpinning all U.S. immigration enforcement. But that's actually why the places where prospective deportees are held are called detention centers and not prisons, which is what they actually are, because it's not criminal. That's why they can be held there indefinitely with no access to a lawyer, no court-appointed lawyer. There was a report that Amnesty released about this thing at Alligator Alcatraz called the cage, which is like this two foot high metal box where detainees could be forced into in the hot Florida sun.

9:21You know, Amnesty International called that torture. But under U.S. law, there's like this twisted logic of, OK, there's no criminal case. So there's no punishment. And therefore, we're not doing anything wrong, basically. So German and his family and a bunch of other people seeking asylum, they end up in this pencil factory in Costa Rica. This is all many months ago, right? So how does it play out? You know, where does German story end? So in April, Costa Rica issued a temporary status to the people at the pencil factory, which meant that they could leave. They were no longer detained. They could continue to use the pencil factory as shelter, but they were no longer trapped.

10:00You don't have to stay here, but you can stay here? But you can stay here. Yeah. And German and his family didn't have any very many other options. They had few connections in the country. They couldn't speak the language. They weren't sure what they were going to do. So I worry about my wife. I just don't want to be a failure for my family. Some of the other people at the pencil factory started to melt away. Many went back to their home countries. Others went back to the U.S. border to try for asylum again. And actually, a lot of those folks are currently in detention at the border indefinitely.

10:38So none of this was encouraging to German. He did really debate about going back to the border. He has a really strong sense of fairness, and he was really upset about what happened to him. He just didn't think it was right. Who did he blame?

10:56I asked him, you know, as an American, like, how do you feel about the fact that I'm interviewing you? How do you feel about my country? And he said, no, no, no, it's not your country. It's just a specific group of people. and they've created this image of an immigrant as a criminal and there's some use to this image. You know, I'm a fitness coach. I'm a fitness coach. I never made a deep research about how, what the society feels about immigrants. And I know when you speak about immigrants, you mostly speak about criminals. So immigrant is equal to criminals right now in the people's mind because that is image they create.

11:39And there are some reasons for this image being created, I know. The nuance of that response, it really struck me. He, like, sees the political value in demonizing him. 100 percent. Yeah, he really grasped that. But I never thought that I will be this faceless immigrant, too. How typical is German's case? Is the case of all these people put on a flight to Costa Rica? Like, where else are asylum seekers getting sent to? And how many people are we talking about? We're talking about thousands of people since January 2025, upwards of 8 ,000 people sent to countries that aren't their own. Like, you know, famously, you've seen like El Salvador, South Sudan, but there's also other countries in Africa, Ghana, Eswatini, Panama.

12:30And they faced really tough conditions there, right? Some of these people are being sent to prisons and war zones. There's violence. People have endured sexual abuse, disease, not to mention just the stress of it all. German and his family, you know, thankfully, did not end up going back to the border. Instead, they're in Costa Rica. Their status is still unclear. German is working at a gym again. His wife is a barista. They're not making enough money. And they don't feel totally committed to Costa Rica, right? We know nothing about this country. We don't know language. We don't know culture. They're not sure that they want to settle here.

13:11But they're kind of like, what else do we do at this point? And we've got a plan how to live here right now.

13:25John Fasile, Snap Judgment from KQED Snap Studios. John's got a longer version of this story out now wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up, an obit for American Asylum.

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17:54You're listening to Today Explained. We're back. It's Today Explained. I'm Miles Bryan. Micah Rosenberg is a national investigative reporter at ProPublica who's covered immigration for many years. Lately, she's been reporting on third country deportations, too. This is really one of the most sort of novel and surprising things that the Trump administration has tried. For years, multiple administrations have struggled with a particular issue of countries that have refused to take back their own nationals as deportees. And so during the first Trump administration, he forged agreements with some Central American countries to take back some deportees from different nationalities.

18:38But it was mostly, you know, regional migrants and they didn't really get very far. And this time around, they've really ramped up this strategy significantly.

18:48Miles Bryan:In a brief unsigned order, the court clearing the way for the Trump administration to swiftly deport migrants to countries where they have no previous ties. Migrants from Afghanistan, Russia, Iran and China were deported from the United States and dropped into Panama. Deport him to Uzbekistan. Eight migrants to South Sudan. From the U.S. to Uganda. Landed in Eswatini. They've signed these types of agreements with countries, including really far-flung ones like South Sudan and Uganda. And, you know, they're really taking it to another level. And one of the most sort of audacious and consequential deportations so far of Trump's presidency, he sent close to 230 Venezuelan nationals to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

19:36238 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador aboard three planes and now in that prison. The Trump administration deporting a Venezuelan asylum seeker who has no criminal record and who his family says is not a gang member. This footage, distributed by the Salvadoran government, shows the men arriving at the prison shackled. He accused them of being, you know, the worst of the worst, gang members. To expedite removals of the Tren de Aragua savage gangs, I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 17... Our reporting, you know, at ProPublica and with Venezuelan reporting partners, we found that the government knew that the vast majority of these men had never been convicted of any crimes in the United States, but they were sort of rounded up and whisked away to this prison where they were held for months before they were released in a prisoner exchange.

20:29So this is something that has never really been tried before at this scale, and it's being challenged in court, but it's very difficult to challenge because once these people are outside of the United States, They're mostly outside of the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. And so it's leaving a lot of people in very precarious situations. I think it'd be helpful to kind of remind everybody, including myself, what this system and the process looked like before Trump started blowing it up. Like, can you paint us a picture of how this was working under the Biden administration? So during the Biden administration, this phenomenon of people arriving at the border and really turning themselves in to border officials to claim asylum really exploded under the Biden administration.

21:24And so the people that were coming and asking for refuge were overwhelming border stations. And many ended up being released into the country to make their claims in immigration court. What qualifies you for asylum is a really sort of narrow band of reasons. It's granted to people specifically who fear persecution because of their race, their religion, their nationality, their political opinion or membership in a particular social group. These are defined in law. And the system has really been set up in the past acknowledging that those things can be very difficult to prove. You know, especially if you're fleeing out of fear, you might not have all of the proof that you need.

22:10You're really running for your life. And that's why the court system was set up in this way. It was supposed to give people time to gather evidence, to make their claims. I think there are a lot of people who were arriving at the border who really did have or do have legitimate asylum claims. They're fleeing for their lives. They're facing political persecution. But mixed in there, I think, are people who are coming for other reasons. They're facing serious economic hardship or violence or really political and economic breakdown in their home countries. But what the Trump administration has done by believing that almost all of the asylum claims are fraudulent or not legitimate, they're really sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

22:57And advocates are saying that these changes have made it nearly impossible for legitimate asylum seekers to really get protection. How do people in countries, you know, far from the United States find out or come to believe that flying to Mexico and then trekking to the border and then waiting at the border and then maybe turning themselves in was going to lead to a better life? Yeah, I think it's very different for every nationality and every group. But yeah, there were WhatsApp groups, there were TikTok influencers who were advertising different routes for making it to the United States. Acompáñame en este recorrido porque te mostraré día a día cómo lo hice.

23:42People from countries deeper in South America, in India and parts of Africa started understanding that they could come to the border and claim asylum and potentially be released to pursue their claims. There were hundreds of thousands of people who were making a perilous trek on foot through the dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama.

24:08The conditions are incredibly harsh. We just saw a woman that nearly broke her ankle in the river. African and Indian migrants were going into debt for tens of thousands of dollars to pay for commercial and charter flights into Nicaragua and then to make their way through Mexico. Are you afraid that you can die? Of course. Anything could happen to anybody on this route. Is anyone still getting asylum? Like, is this still happening at all? Or has Trump just turned the tap off completely? Well, you know, the Trump administration's goals of sealing off the border are really being accomplished in many ways.

24:46Border crossings have dropped to record lows and releases of people into the country to try and go through this core process have also really dropped. And so there has really been a reduction in the ability for people to seek protection here. So you're telling us this story of these huge swings in our asylum policy. It seems like a big hinge point or a reason that those swings are possible is because the policy is being set with executive orders, right? Like it's just the president saying something. Do you think there's any possibility that Congress is going to actually make any meaningful changes to our asylum system?

25:25Or are we going to exist in this jarring timeline of swinging back and forth based on the executive orders of whoever is in the Oval Office indefinitely? Well, everyone says that we are where we are right now because Congress for decades has never gotten around to passing any really meaningful, comprehensive immigration reform. So we're working with kind of an outdated system. So each president that comes in basically makes immigration policy through fiat and executive actions. And those can be challenged in court. They can be quickly overturned if a different party comes into office. This is something that would take real meaningful bipartisan action.