A federal appeals court ruled Sept. 19 that the Trump administration’s policy of rapidly deporting migrants to third countries, nations with no connection to their original case, violates due process, in a ruling covering a policy that has already sent more than 25,000 people to nations they had never lived in or been ordered removed to.
What the Panel Decided
A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, led by Circuit Judge Seth Aframe, largely upheld a lower court’s decision invalidating the Department of Homeland Security policy. In the majority opinion, Aframe wrote that the government’s position “would deny access to that protection to a substantial swath of noncitizens who are sent to third countries with no notice of their destination,” according to GV Wire.
Trina Realmuto, an attorney for the plaintiffs with the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said the ruling “confirms that due process and the protections Congress enacted against persecution and torture cannot be circumvented by putting someone on a plane to a country that was never part of their removal proceedings.” DHS General Counsel James Percival pushed back on social media, writing: “If you claim fear in your home country, DHS has the right to send you elsewhere.”
How the Policy Worked
DHS adopted the policy in March 2025, allowing the government to deport migrants who already had final removal orders to countries other than their home country or the one named in their original order, as long as the receiving country provided “diplomatic assurances” against persecution or torture. Migrants typically received only minimal notice before removal under the policy.
According to Third Country Deportation Watch, cited by US News, more than 25,000 migrants have been sent to at least 29 countries under this and related policies, including South Sudan, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia and the Central African Republic.
The Government’s Third Trip to the Supreme Court
This is not the first time this specific fight over third-country deportations has reached the highest levels of the federal court system. The Trump administration has already twice persuaded the Supreme Court to lift preliminary injunctions against the underlying policy while litigation continued in lower courts, meaning the policy has previously been allowed to operate, at least temporarily, over the objections of the same plaintiffs now prevailing at the circuit level.
That history makes the 1st Circuit’s ruling this week the third distinct round in a fight that keeps returning to the same basic question: how much notice and process a deportation to an unrelated third country requires.
Why the Notice Requirement Is the Real Fight
The dispute turns less on whether third-country deportations are permissible at all and more on what “diplomatic assurances” and minimal notice actually mean in practice. A migrant who receives only brief notice before being placed on a flight to a country like South Sudan or the Central African Republic has little realistic opportunity to challenge that destination or present evidence that the receiving country poses its own risks, even if that country has offered written assurances to the U.S. government.
The 1st Circuit’s ruling addresses that gap directly, finding that the process DHS provided fell short of what due process requires before someone can be sent somewhere with no connection to their case.
What “Diplomatic Assurances” Are Supposed to Guarantee
The concept at the center of the policy, a receiving country’s written assurance that it will not persecute or torture a deportee, has a long history in U.S. immigration and extradition law, rooted in obligations under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the United States has ratified. In ordinary practice, those assurances are meant to give the government confidence that a specific individual will not face the harm the law is designed to prevent, and they typically accompany an individualized assessment of that person’s circumstances.
Plaintiffs in this case argued DHS treated the assurances as a blanket justification for sending large groups of people to a handful of receiving countries, rather than conducting the individualized review the assurance framework was designed around, a distinction the 1st Circuit’s ruling effectively endorsed by finding the process insufficient regardless of the assurances DHS had obtained.
What Happens Next
The administration is expected to seek Supreme Court review a third time, continuing a pattern in which the government has repeatedly sought emergency relief from the high court after losing at the district or circuit level. Unless and until the Supreme Court intervenes again, the 1st Circuit’s ruling stands, meaning DHS cannot resume the rapid third-country removal process as it operated under the March 2025 policy.
The roughly 25,000 people already removed under the policy are not directly addressed by this ruling, which governs future removals rather than ordering anyone’s return, leaving their legal status in the receiving countries unaffected by this week’s decision regardless of how the underlying policy is ultimately resolved.
Each time the Supreme Court has previously intervened in this litigation, it has done so on the emergency docket, ruling on whether to pause a lower court’s order while the underlying legal questions continue to be litigated, rather than issuing a final decision on the policy’s legality.
That pattern means even a third Supreme Court intervention would likely address only whether the 1st Circuit’s ruling can take effect immediately, not whether the third-country deportation policy is ultimately lawful, a question that would still need to work its way through full merits briefing and argument before the justices resolve it permanently.
