The Trump administration appears to be laying the groundwork for a global gulag for expelled immigrants. In addition to using long-time US detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the Trump administration is seeking more far-flung locales to hold deported people, regardless of their countries of origin.

The US is already using the notorious Terrorism Confinement Centre or CECOT in Tecoluca, El Salvador, and has its sights set on numerous other countries, including many that the State Department has excoriated for human rights abuses.

The US has reportedly explored, sought or struck deals with at least 19 countries: Angola, Benin, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Kosovo, Libya, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Panama, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

“These are the plans of an authoritarian regime. They want to spend likely billions of taxpayer dollars to send asylum-seekers into war zones or to countries rife with human rights abuses,” Senator Chris Murphy (Democratic, Connecticut), told The Intercept.

“It’s truly alarming that this administration doesn’t view people fleeing persecution or torture as human and that the United States government is even discussing this obviously illegal proposal. It’s deeply un-American, will make all Americans less safe, and will, without a doubt, result in the loss of human life,” Murphy said.

“It’s deeply un-American, will make all Americans less safe, and will, without a doubt, result in the loss of human life,”

The State Department refused to provide a complete list of countries with which the US has made agreements to accept deportees from other countries – often referred to as third-country nationals – citing the sensitivity of diplomatic communications. But the Trump administration is planning a major increase in deportation flights in coming weeks to destinations across the globe, according to a government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, as well as published reports.

In remarks outside the White House on Friday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller offered a glimpse of the global scope of deportations.

“We send planes to Iraq. We send planes to Yemen. We send planes to Haiti. We send planes to Angola,” he said. “I mean, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, now known as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is sending planes all over the world all the time. Anyone who came here illegally, we’re finding them and we’re getting them out.”

The White House did not respond to a request for clarification about which countries are receiving third-country nationals. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration created a worldwide network of secret prisons and torture sites as part of its global war on terror. Its crown jewel, the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, was established in January 2002 as a place for the United States to hold so-called enemy combatants.

The US government chose the US Naval Station Guantánamo Bay because it was seeking a site where neither US nor international law applied – a legal black hole where they could disappear people indefinitely. Over time, Guantánamo became emblematic of gross human rights abuses.

“Forever prisoners” of the war on terror are still being held there today. Others caught up in America’s counterterrorism dragnet were detained at torture prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq or kidnapped and “rendered” to CIA black sites – secret prisons in at least eight countries around the world.

As the Trump administration has expanded the Bush and Obama-era terrorism paradigm to cast immigrants and refugees as terrorists and gang members, it has reconceptualised rendition and even pressed Guantánamo Bay into service as a way station for Venezuelan men expelled to El Salvador.

“In many ways, this is a retread of some of the practices of the second Bush administration in terms of extraordinary rendition abroad; the RDI programme, rendition, detention and interrogation – the formal name for their torture programme,” said Brian Finucane, who worked for a decade in the Office of the Legal Advisor at the Department of State where he advised the US government on counterterrorism and other military matters. “Using the counterterrorism model, the Trump administration believes it provides it with broad authority to ride roughshod over civil rights.”

In March, the Trump administration used the Alien Enemies Act to deny due process to more than 250 Venezuelan and Salvadoran men, transferring them to El Salvador despite the objections of a federal judge. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele disappeared the men into the country’s shadowy prison system, which is rife with abuse, torture, and other human rights violations, according to human rights groups.

The Trump administration’s suspension of rights mirrors Bukele’s own violation of democratic norms. Since 2022, the country has been under a state of emergency where most civil rights have been suspended to conduct mass arrests to crack down on the country’s gangs. The dragnet has led to the arbitrary imprisonment of thousands of people wrongfully accused of being gang members.

In similar fashion, the Trump administration accused the expelled Venezuelan men of being members of a gang called Tren de Aragua with little to no evidence. Even Bukele had reason to doubt the evidence provided by the Trump administration, according to a New York Times investigation. Other media investigations have also revealed the vast majority of the men did not have criminal records.

The Supreme Court has already ruled unanimously that it was illegal for the Trump administration to send one of the men, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to CECOT and ordered his release and return to the US The Trump and Bukele administrations have ignored this decision. Garcia is now being held at another facility in El Salvador.

In addition to imprisoning third-country nationals in El Salvador, the US has also expelled hundreds of African and Asian immigrants to Costa Rica and Panama, including people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Uzbekistan, for its part, received more than 100 deportees from the United States, including not only Uzbeks but citizens of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, according to a statement by the Department of Homeland Security released late last month.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also said her government had accepted roughly 6,000 non-Mexicans from the US, since Trump took office again, for “humanitarian reasons.” Unlike in El Salvador, people expelled to these countries are likely not being held indefinitely in detention centres, but details on the fate of many are scant.

The Trump administration is currently seeking more countries in Asia to accept expelled immigrants from elsewhere in the world, according to Sean O’Neill, the senior bureau official for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the Department of State.

“We do have discussions with other countries who agree to take third country national deportees,” he said at a press briefing last week, noting that the US is “working closely with countries in the region who are willing to accept third-country nationals with final orders of removal — in other words, folks who are not actually from that country.”

A State Department spokesperson also told The Intercept that “US partners and regional leaders are working closely with us to end the crisis of illegal and mass migration.” One area of collaboration seems to be finding dangerous places to send vulnerable people.

Eden Golan of Israel enters the arena during the flag parade before the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo, Sweden, on May 11, 2024.

Last week, the Trump administration was poised to send immigrants from the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos and Mexico, among other countries to Libya and possibly Saudi Arabia. Experts say that the plan to deport immigrants to Libya – a war-ravaged nation that descended into violence after the US helped to overthrow its government in 2011 and is known for widespread mistreatment of migrants and refugees — would represent not only a gross human rights violation but also a brazen act of defiance toward the federal judiciary.

“It seems like they’re actually removing them to a country with the intent of causing harm.”

“There are provisions in immigration law to send somebody to a third country. We’ve done that in the past. We’ve made arrangements with Ecuador, for example, to take Palestinian nationals who we can’t send back because they’re stateless, with assurances that they are not in danger in that third country,” said Michelle Brané, the former Immigration Detention Ombudsman at the US Department of Homeland Security. “But not only do these current cases fall outside of that category, but it seems like they’re actually removing them to a country with the intent of causing harm.”

Libya operates numerous detention facilities for immigrants on behalf of European nations. Amnesty International called these prisons a “hellscape” in a 2021 report, saying it had found evidence that adults and children were subjected to “arbitrary detention and systematically subjected to torture, sexual violence, forced labour and other exploitation with total impunity.”

The most recent State Department report on human rights in Libya criticized its “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions” and cited numerous analyses which found “migrants routinely experienced unlawful killings, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual exploitation, and other abuses”; that perpetrators included “state officials”; and that “various UN entities documented human rights abuses committed against migrants in detention centres throughout the year.”

• A Tell report / Nick Turse and Jonah Valdez/ Republished from The Intercept