WASHINGTON — The Trump administration spent at least $40 million to deport roughly 300 migrants to countries other than their own as immigration officials expanded the practice over the last year to carry out President Donald Trump’s goals of quickly removing immigrants from the U.S., according to a report compiled by the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The Democrats on the Foreign Relations panel, led by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, criticize the practice of third country deportations as “costly, wasteful and poorly monitored” in the report and call for “serious scrutiny of a policy that now operates largely in the dark.”
The State Department, which oversees the negotiations to implement the programs, has stood behind the practice of third country deportations and defended it as a part of Trump’s campaign to end illegal immigration.
“We’ve arrested people that are members of gangs and we’ve deported them. We don’t want gang members in our country,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded when asked about some of the third country deportations at a Senate hearing last month.
The report, which is the first congressional review of the agreements, found lump sum payments ranging between $4.7 million and $7.5 million to five countries – Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, El Salvador, Eswatini and Palau – to deport migrants to those nations. El Salvador has received about 250 Venezuelan nationals in March last year, while the other nations received far fewer deportees, ranging from 29 sent to Equatorial Guinea to none sent to Palau so far, according to the report.
The nations examined in the report are just a fraction of the Trump administration’s overall work to deport migrants to third countries. According to internal administration documents reviewed by The Associated Press, there are 47 third-country agreements at various stages of negotiation. Of those, 15 have been concluded and 10 are at or near conclusion.
The administration is also negotiating agreements with countries that will accept U.S. asylum seekers while their asylum claims are processed, according to the internal documents. There are 17 that are at various stages of negotiation, including 9 that have formally taken effect, although the administration claims that the agreements do not necessarily need to be concluded for people to be sent there.
Immigration advocacy groups have criticized the “third country” policy as a reckless tactic that violates due process rights and can strand deportees in countries with long histories of human rights violations and corruption.
During a visit to South Sudan, Democratic committee staff found a gated house with armed guards where deportees were held, including migrants from Vietnam and Mexico.
The Democrats also largely take aim at how wasteful and ineffective the policy may be. It details several instances of migrants being deported to a third country, only for the U.S. to later pay for another flight to return the migrant to their home country.
“In many cases, migrants could have been returned directly to their countries of origin, avoiding unnecessary flights and additional costs,” said Shaheen in a statement also signed by Democratic Sens. Chris Coons, Tammy Duckworth, Tim Kaine, Jack Rosen and Chris Van Hollen.
It also remains unclear what benefits the countries may receive – or expect – in return for accepting third-country nationals.
After an agreement was in place last year, South Sudan sent a list of requests to Washington that included American support for the prosecution of an opposition leader and sanctions relief for a senior official accused of diverting over a billion dollars in public funds, according to diplomatic communications made public by the State Department in January.
Shaheen has also questioned a $7.5 million payment sent to Equatorial Guinea that came at the same time the Trump administration was developing ties with the country’s vice president, Teodoro “Teddy” Nguema Obiang. He is notorious among world leaders accused of corruption for a lavish lifestyle that has attracted the attention of prosecutors in several countries.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings Credit: via Orange County Mayor Jerry L. Demings/Facebook
As mayors in some parts of the country are demanding greater transparency from federal immigration enforcement following reports of aggressive arrests, Orange County mayor Jerry Demings argued Tuesday that county officials don’t really have the power to address these concerns themselves. That’s despite growing pressure for them to do so.
“The resolution to this issue is not in these chambers, it is somewhere else,” Demings stated bluntly in response to public criticism from local rights advocates. “If there’s a complaint about how these individuals are doing their business, if they’re violating rights, I believe that the appropriate venue for those types of complaints is either with the federal government, with the state or the courts — not the Orange County Commission.”
Demings, a former sheriff and Democratic mayor governing in a Republican-controlled state, was placed on the hot seat during a county board meeting Tuesday by advocates with the Immigrants Are Welcome Here Coalition, made up of 64 local legal aid, social advocacy and labor organizations and 140 faith leaders.
Hope CommUnity Center organizing director Ericka Gomez-Tejeda said immigrant communities in Orange County, including U.S. citizens afraid of being racially profiled by ICE agents, “are living the nightmares that we and every U.S. American citizen dreads.”
“We are seeing people aggressively being taken by masked agents in our communities. Unmarked uniforms, arrests without warrants,” she told the county board of commissioners and the press. “Now we have the [Florida] Fish and Wildlife and, incredibly, even the [Florida] Department of Finance agents in our streets, at our doors, working for ICE,” she added.
Florida, a state with one of the largest populations of undocumented people in the U.S., has been recognized as an “essential” partner in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants living in the country without legal status. Although ICE claims to be going after the “worst of the worst illegal aliens,” Orange County corrections data reveals a sharp influx in the number of people who are being detained solely on federal immigration holds, not any actual criminal charges.
“We are seeing people aggressively being taken by masked agents in our communities.”
Hope CommUnity Center organizing director Ericka Gomez-Tejeda
Deputy county administrator of public safety Danny Banks said, as of Tuesday, the jail was holding 120 people detained by ICE solely on the alleged charge of being in the country illegally.
“As recently as last week, that was down as low as 25,” Banks told county leaders. “In the last six months, we’ve seen it sharply decline and then come back up again. But the point is, yes, 120 is a lot.”
The Orlando Sentinelconfirmed through a jail official that, as of Nov. 30, the Orange County Jail has booked nearly 6,000 people on ICE detainers this year alone.
‘We spent hours looking for my mother’
Johanna Alvarez, a U.S. citizen and daughter of an immigrant, said her own mother was lured out of her home last month and subsequently detained on a federal immigration hold by men who had identified themselves to her as state police.
According to Alvarez, the men told her mom they wanted to talk to her about her car. “My mom, thinking something had happened to me since I had gone to go drop off my daughters at school, went outside with them. And as soon as she passed the gate of our house, they arrested her and took her to the Immigration Detention Center.”
Johanna Alvarez shares the story of her mother being detained (Dec. 16, 2025) Credit: McKenna Schueler
Alvarez said a man who identified himself as a “financial detective” called her shortly afterward to let her know her mom had been detained. “He said he didn’t know where they had taken her, which was a lie, because he was the one who took my mom to the detention center,” she said.
“We spent hours looking for my mother without answers.”
Alvarez’s mother, originally from Mexico, had lived in the U.S. for 26 years, “always fulfilling” what immigration authorities asked of her, according to Alvarez. She was detained by agents on Nov. 19, and was released only on the condition that she return to Mexico. On Dec. 14, her mother returned to Mexico with Alvarez’s 2-year-old sister, leaving behind Alvarez, her 18-year-old sister, and grandchildren.
“This will be our first Christmas without her,” Alvarez told the press Tuesday, as tears streamed down her face. She said she and her sister, both born in the U.S., have started carrying their U.S. passports with them everywhere “in fear,” after an immigration officer allegedly told them “we didn’t look like U.S. citizens.”
Farmworker Association of Florida organizer Aaron Quen, out of Apopka, told the press his community has seen an increase of Florida Fish & Wildlife officers acting as ICE agents, “creating fear, confusion, and distrust.”
Banks, the public safety director, said that county staff are “not privy” to federal law enforcement operations, “so I really wouldn’t know what their plans are, or how they choose where to go, who to arrest, who gets arrested, who doesn’t get arrested, and so forth.”
Mayor Demings backed away from calls for transparency on ICE arrests that came not just from local advocates, but also county commissioners Kelly Semrad and Nicole Wilson, who have been sympathetic to the immigrant coalition’s cause.
“I watched the city of New Orleans struggle with this type of thing, and the mayor there very strongly said, we need transparency. We need to know which agents are pulling people from these homes,” Wilson pressed. “For all we know they’re being smuggled into human trafficking. We don’t know who they are, they don’t show their badges, they don’t show a judicial warrant, and we don’t get any of that information.”
Orange County Commissioner Nicole Wilson speaks at a press conference organized by the Immigrants Are Welcome Here coalition (Dec. 16, 2025) Credit: McKenna Schueler
While Demings acknowledged during the board meeting that questions about due process and transparency are “valid,” he argued that the county “is not involved in that.”
“We do not have authority over the state of Florida or the federal government in that regard,” he said. All the county can do, he said, is reassure the public that those who are detained in the county jail “are treated humanely, with dignity and respect.”
At what cost?
Meanwhile, the federal government has not even committed to fully reimbursing the Orange County government for holding people detained by ICE. While the cost of housing a person in the jail is about $180 per night, the federal government has only agreed to reimburse $88 per person, per night.
Jennifer Hall, an organizer with Orlando 50501, said an estimated $14.3 million has been spent so far this year to house people detained by ICE in the local jail. The calculation is based on the approximate number of people detained on ICE holds in 2025 and the approximate cost for doing so, per person. “Of that, $6.36 million dollars will never be reimbursed,” she said. A jail spokesperson estimates the figure is closer to $1.74 million.
From November 2024 to November 2025, the average daily population of people held solely on ICE detainers in the county jail increased 871 percent, from about 7 people to 70 people, according to corrections data.
Corrections officials for Orange County have said they’re working to renegotiate a higher reimbursement rate with the federal government. However, they say the process was delayed by the 43-day federal government shutdown that began Oct. 1. Banks said they received further communication on the matter as recently as last week and expect “some solution to that” within the next few months.
Demings similarly tried to downplay concerns about how much it’s costing taxpayers to detain people like Alvarez’s mom. “It is my intent that every dollar that we have spent to house the federal inmates, we will seek to get those dollars back,” he said. “That process is playing itself out.”
Urging court action
Advocates with the immigrant coalition have urged the county to take legal action in order to seek court guidance on the extent to which the Orange County government must cooperate with ICE.
“National news show political leaders from all around the country taking all actions possible to protect their residents from legally questionable ICE operations and the militarization of their cities,” said Gomez. “And yet here at home, this county commission is heading into the holiday break without filing for the legal clarity of your obligations to cooperate with ICE.”
Under state law, the county is required to cooperate with and aid ICE, at least to some extent. But not all of their obligations are so clear-cut. Earlier this year, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier bullied Mayor Demings and county commissioners into signing an amendment to the county’s contract with ICE that they had believed was voluntary, not necessary, for them to sign onto.
The amendment authorized local corrections employees to transport ICE detainees to other detention facilities across the state, upon request — a task that county leaders worried would unnecessarily stretch the corrections departments’ resources. County commissioners initially decided not to sign the addendum, but reversed course after Uthmeier threatened to remove them from office if they didn’t. Commissioners Semrad and Wilson were the lone dissenters.
“Yes, I signed the damn thing because we really had to,” Demings said at the time. “We were put in a tough spot.”
Kevin Parker with the Florida Immigrant Coalition, however, said legal professional and national advocacy organizations his group has spoken to “believe Orange County stands in a unique and perhaps the best position to seek court guidance on the limits of local government cooperation with ICE.”
“It’s important that the residents of this county believe that their local government officials are doing everything in their power to protect them from racial profiling and inhuman treatment they’re seeing online and in the news every day,” Parker said.
Demings, however, said that although they don’t agree with Uthmeier’s interpretation of their obligation to sign that ICE agreement addendum, he doesn’t see the point in taking legal action at this time. “I don’t see a legal predicate or something that we’re trying to clarify at this point that is necessary.”
County attorney Jeff Newton also said that he believed it would be “premature” to pursue litigation, arguing that there’s “no real basis” for doing so at this time. “I think there may come a point in time where this county may have to file some litigation, but that time is not today.”
Nearly 26 percent of Orange County’s population is foreign-born, as of 2023 Census data. That’s almost double the national U.S. rate of 14 percent. A new study from researchers at the University of South Florida in Tampa, surveying immigrant experiences in Central Florida, found that Florida’s immigration policies and the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants has had an emotional, financial and physical toll on migrants with mixed legal statuses, in addition to U.S. born citizens in mixed-status households.
Survey respondents told researchers they were afraid to go looking for work, go on walks or even listen to music too loud in their own homes for fear neighbors would call law enforcement.
“We’re good people; we’re people who, during the time we’ve been here, have contributed to this country. We pay our property taxes, our work taxes, our car taxes, everything, we pay taxes on everything,” said survey respondent Alberto, a 57-year-old undocumented man from Mexico who’s lived in the U.S. for 27 years. “They make us look like criminals, but in reality, we’re not.”
According to data from the Deportation Data Project, prepared by Stateline, Florida has seen more than 20,100 immigration arrests since January under the Trump administration. The vast majority of those detained — 68 percent — had no criminal conviction.
In a nation that prides itself on being built by immigrants, North Fair Oaks — an unincorporated San Mateo County community informally known as “Little Mexico” by locals — is confronting a surge of intolerance toward immigrants, fueled by right-wing rhetoric.
As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump intensifies his promise to carry out the largest mass deportation in American history at campaign rallies, residents gathered Thursday at Casa Circulo Cultural in North Fair Oaks to push back. Community members from this neighborhood of fewer than 15,000, predominantly Latino and Hispanic immigrants, united to advocate for enhanced protections in response to the escalating anti-immigrant pronouncements from the former president and his GOP allies.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 11 million people in the United States live without legal status. If Trump is elected and fulfills his promise to deport them all, it could have devastating consequences – including impacts on housing construction, farming and the economy as a whole.
North Fair Oaks is one of three areas in San Mateo County with a majority Hispanic or Latino population, alongside East Palo Alto in the south and Pescadero on the coast. Overall, at least 25% of San Mateo County’s 764,442 residents identify as Hispanic or Latino.
Maggie Cornejo, a first-generation Mexican American raised in North Fair Oaks, describes the current climate as reminiscent of the mid-2000s, when feared Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were a frequent presence in her neighborhood.
“A lot of people in my community are afraid of what could happen on Tuesday because one candidate is clearly more vocal about his views on the immigrant community,” Cornejo said.
Now a planning commissioner in nearby Redwood City, Cornejo reflected on her childhood trauma.
“I’m a native of North Fair Oaks, so I remember when many of my classmates’ parents were being deported,” Cornejo said. “That trauma still impacts our generation; we grew up with memories of ICE driving around here to pick people up.”
State Senator Josh Becker, a Democrat representing most of San Mateo County and parts of northern Santa Clara County, addressed community members who may feel demoralized or fearful due to rising anti-immigrant sentiment.
“We have thousands of immigrant farmworkers along the San Mateo coast supporting a vibrant agricultural ecosystem, but they weren’t heard, seen, or valued until the pandemic,” Becker said. “Suddenly, people acknowledged them as essential workers. We also have many Asian immigrants — Chinese, Korean, Japanese. To me, that diversity is what makes America great; it’s literally the melting pot.”
Becker also discussed Senate Bill 537, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September, which memorializes the deportation of U.S. citizens and legal residents of Mexican descent between 1929 and 1944. The bill mandates the construction of a memorial in the city of Los Angeles or the county to honor this historical event.
“President Herbert Hoover, during the 1930s, faced tough economic times and said, ‘We need these jobs for real Americans,’” Becker said. “He launched a mass deportation effort, resulting in the deportation of not only immigrants but also citizens.”
Becker cited government estimates indicating that 60% of those deported during that period were American citizens, totaling almost 2 million people.
“We’re here to say no; we’re not going to let that happen on our watch,” he asserted.
Becker and local leaders at Thursday’s press conference assured residents they would work to ensure California’s sanctuary protections of migrants would remain, despite Trump’s threats to defund law enforcement agencies that refuse to cooperate with ICE deportations.
“There are trainings on community responses to ICE; we can ensure people’s due process and rights are honored. We’ll bring community groups together if it comes to that,” Becker said.
Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, founder of the nonprofit Ayudando Latinos a Soñar, cautioned that the use of violent language can translate into real-world physical violence.
“For those fed this vile anti-immigrant rhetoric, they’re taking actions into their own hands to be vicious against immigrants,” Arriaga, a clinical mental health therapist, stated. “We’re seeing what happened in Springfield, and it’s heartbreaking.”
Arriaga referred to the increased threats against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, following Trump’s unfounded claims that migrants were stealing and eating pets. According to a CNN report, two local Walmarts and several schools were evacuated due to threats stemming from Trump’s comments, prompting the deployment of additional security and bomb detection dogs to ensure the city’s safety.
Arriaga is all too familiar with violence against immigrants here at home.
As some recent political polls show growing approval for Trump among Latino voters, North Fair Oaks resident Rafael Avendaño, an immigrant from El Salvador and now a U.S. citizen, urged fellow Latinos to reconsider their support.
“The Republican Party that I know built NACARA, which allowed me to obtain documentation status. We’re very far from the Republican Party I remember,” Avendaño said, referring to the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, which was signed in 1997 under President Bill Clinton but received some bipartisan support. “I hope that however you vote, you lean toward a choice that respects and loves your community members because that’s how this nation was built.”