A federal appeals court roundly rejected the Trump administration’s third-country removal policy on Friday, largely upholding a lower court’s decision that the policy was unlawful. The three-judge panel on the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that immigrants must be given more time to raise fears about removal to a third country, while casting doubt on diplomatic agreements with the expanding network of “host” countries.
Immigration attorneys and immigrant rights groups hailed the decision, while noting it was unlikely to help the tens of thousands of immigrants already subjected to third-country removal. And though the decision is effective immediately, it may not stop the Supreme Court from using the so-called shadow docket to stay the ruling and allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to continue using the policy during appeal, they said.
“DHS has used third-country removal to terrorize people who have been authorized to live here for decades and to circumvent protections granted by the immigration courts,” said Matt Adams, legal director at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, joint counsel for the plaintiffs in the case. “The First Circuit’s holding makes clear that DHS’s third-country removal program blatantly violates the law.”
“People removed under this policy have been dumped without documentation in countries where they have never lived, they have faced abuses including arbitrary detention and physical abuse in those third countries, as well as onward removal to countries from which the United States has granted them protection,” said Anwen Hughes, senior director of legal strategy for refugee programs with Human Rights First.
More than 25,000 people have been expelled to third countries during President Trump’s second term, according to Third Country Deportation Watch.
“The First Circuit’s holding makes clear that DHS’s third-country removal program blatantly violates the law.”
The case, D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security, began early in Trump’s second term with a handful of plaintiffs who said they feared they would be deported to a third country under a new ICE policy. It was then expanded to include the whole class of immigrants who could be potential targets, many of whom had lived in the U.S. for decades. “D.V.D.” are the initials of the lead plaintiff.
The Trump administration argued that if it could not deport someone to their country of origin, it could remove them to a third country without any notice, so long as the third country gave the State Department blanket “diplomatic assurances” that the individual would not be harmed. If the third country had not given diplomatic assurances, the Trump administration said it needed to give an immigrant only six hours of notice about where they were headed, and that only the immigrant, not their legal counsel, could express a credible fear of removal to the third country.
U.S. District Court Judge in Massachusetts Brian Murphy issued a temporary restraining order barring removals under the policy in March 2025. But two months later, ICE appeared to violate the order when it put seven immigrants from all over the world on a private jet to South Sudan. In an emergency hearing, Murphy ordered the Trump administration not to let the immigrants out of U.S. custody. The jet landed at a U.S. military base in Djibouti, where the immigrants were imprisoned inside a shipping container.
The Supreme Court lifted Murphy’s order weeks later in a shadow docket ruling, allowing the policy to move forward while the case was pending. The seven immigrants were expelled to South Sudan on the Fourth of July, where they were imprisoned in a government compound. Fourteen months later, five are still imprisoned; two have been repatriated to their countries of origin
Since then, the Trump administration has expelled thousands of third-country nationals to more than two dozen countries, where many of those “diplomatic assurances” have proved flimsy. This includes countries controlled by authoritarians where the immigrants are imprisoned, like Eswatini and Equatorial Guinea, and countries beset by deep poverty and civil war, like Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In February 2026, Murphy issued a final ruling striking down the policy, but his decision was stayed again when the Trump administration appealed to the First Circuit.
The First Circuit largely upheld Murphy’s decision Friday. It also cast doubt on the credibility of the “blanket assurances” by third countries, and noted that the policy provided no protections against chain refoulement, which occurs when ICE removes someone to a country, which then sends the immigrant to their home country, to which ICE was barred from deporting them. Chain refoulement is prohibited under domestic and international law, yet more than 80 percent of third-country nationals have ended up being refouled, according to a report from Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Immigration attorney Dana Camilleri, whose law firm represents a number of immigrants subjected to third-country removal, noted in text messages to the Prospect the terrible impact the Supreme Court’s shadow docket stay had in the case. “Nearly everyone who has been removed while [the lower-court decision] was stayed are in dire straits or have been refouled,” she said. She had “zero confidence” that the Supreme Court wouldn’t stay it again if the Trump administration appeals, this time to the Supreme Court itself.
“The government could certainly seek a stay, they have repeatedly indicated an intention to seek further Supreme Court review,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, which also brought the case, in an email to the Prospect. “However, if they do so, the posture of the case is markedly different from the prior shadow docket rulings.” In the prior rulings, the Supreme Court was only looking at a few specific aspects of the case, mostly relating to torture, she said. Now they would be looking at the whole case, which could result in a different outcome.
Camilleri’s firm represents Ahmed Soliman, a 30-year-old gay Egyptian man who lived in Arizona for most of his life before ICE forcibly removed him to Equatorial Guinea in April. Soliman and another third-country national from Eritrea have been missing for more than a week after authorities there arrested them. Soliman’s attorneys believe the arrest was retaliation for speaking with the media, including the Prospect, about the conditions at the hotel where he and dozens of other third-country nationals were imprisoned.
Camilleri did not expect the appeals court decision to help Soliman or the thousands of other immigrants already removed to third countries. “The government will probably just continue to say he’s not in their custody,” she said of Soliman, referring to recent statements from a DHS spokesperson to the Prospect that ICE is not responsible for what happens to immigrants once they are expelled to a third country.
“It’s going to take an uproar from the public,” Camilleri said.
Hours before the decision came down Friday, a private jet frequently chartered by ICE landed in Accra, Ghana, where ICE has expelled more third-country nationals in the past year than any other African country. If there were third-country nationals on this flight, they may be the last—for now.
