The Department of Homeland Security paid the government of Equatorial Guinea, a country that has been under the iron grip of the same dictator since 1979, $7.5 million to accept deportees that no other country will take. The Supreme Court this week let the program keep running while it decides whether any of it is legal. The man selling this arrangement to the public is DHS General Counsel James Percival, who is doing it one post at a time on X.
What 'Third-Country' Deportations Actually Are
Here's the basic mechanic. When the U.S. wants to deport someone and their home country refuses to take them back, DHS has the option under a 1996 immigration law called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act to remove them to a third country entirely. The authority has been sitting in the statute for nearly thirty years. According to Fox News Digital, the Trump administration is now using it aggressively in a way previous administrations did not.
Percival, the DHS general counsel, is blunt about why the program exists. 'A lot of people in government sort of treat their authority like fine china,' he told Fox News Digital. 'They're afraid if they ever actually use it, someone will take it away.' The analogy is funny until you realize the 'fine china' in this case involves cutting deals with authoritarian governments and flying people to countries they've never lived in.
Norway Is Not Taking a Rapist From Cuba
Percival's public pitch for the program has a clear rhetorical shape. He is trying to make third-country deportations feel like the only reasonable option, and to do that, he keeps returning to the hardest possible cases. 'If the person is a child rapist and serves 20 years, we have two choices: Find a third country, or let the child rapist go live in an American community,' he told Fox News Digital.
The underlying legal logic traces back to the Supreme Court's 2001 ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis, which held that the government can only detain someone awaiting deportation for roughly six months before that detention becomes constitutionally questionable. If no country will accept a deportee, Percival's argument goes, the U.S. eventually has to release them. So the administration goes hunting for a country that will take the person, whether they have any connection to that country or not.
'Imagine going to a country and saying, hey, we've got a guy, he's not your guy, and he's a rapist, but can he please live there?' Percival said. 'Norway is not taking a rapist from Cuba.' That is a real dilemma. The solution DHS landed on, though, is paying regimes like Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang to say yes.
The Equatorial Guinea Problem
Obiang has ruled Equatorial Guinea since 1979. That is not a typo. The man has been in power for 47 years, having seized control in a coup by executing his own uncle. Human rights organizations have documented decades of torture, arbitrary detention, and suppression of political opposition. This is the government Washington cut a deal with, for $7.5 million, to accept deportees from countries that refused to take them back.
Fox News Digital reports that human rights advocates have already raised allegations that deportees sent to Equatorial Guinea were beaten by authorities there. Percival's response, when asked about people who might prefer to stay in the U.S. rather than be sent to a place like that, was this: 'I'd rather live in the United States than Equatorial Guinea too, but I'm an American citizen and I haven't killed anybody.' The implication being that if you're being deported to a country with a documented torture problem, that is a you problem.
The Supreme Court Weighs In, For Now
The Court this week issued a stay that blocks a lower court order which had restricted the program, according to Fox News Digital. That means third-country deportations can continue while the justices take up the case on the merits. Arguments are scheduled for December.
The legal dispute is narrower than you might expect. The case does not challenge DHS's underlying authority to do third-country removals at all. The fight is specifically about the procedures required before a removal happens, including due process protections and safeguards against sending someone to a place where they face torture. Whether the current procedures are sufficient is what December arguments will address. The administration's position is that it has followed the law. Critics say the process has been so fast that people have been removed before they could meaningfully contest where they were being sent.
The Daily Deportee and the Sales Pitch
Percival is not just litigating this in court. He is running what Fox News Digital describes as a 'Daily Deportee' series on X, posting cases of criminal deportees whose home countries will not accept them. One recent case involved Kyaw Mya, a Burmese national whose country refuses to take him back. The series is openly designed to build public support for the program by putting the worst-case criminal profiles front and center.
It is a smart communications strategy, and it is also a selective one. The cases Percival highlights are real. They are also curated. The program applies to a much broader population than serial violent offenders, and the procedural shortcuts that human rights groups are challenging in court affect everyone caught in this system, not just the people Percival chooses to post about. And at the end of every DHS pitch, there is now a standing offer: according to Fox News Digital, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin keeps reminding people that voluntary departure comes with $3,000 and a flight home.
The Dingo Take
$7.5 million to Teodoro Obiang's government. That is the deal. Not a human rights vetted resettlement program, not a bilateral treaty with an ally, not a negotiated arrangement with a country that has functioning courts and a free press. A cash payment to one of the longest-running dictatorships on the planet in exchange for taking people the U.S. can't figure out what else to do with.
Percival's legal argument is not crazy. The Zadvydas problem is real. If a country refuses repatriation and a six-month detention clock is ticking, the government genuinely does face a bad menu of options. But 'we face a hard problem' and 'therefore paying authoritarian governments to warehouse people with no connection to those countries and then shrugging when they report getting beaten' are not the same sentence. The fine china metaphor is clever. What it papers over is that using a legal authority aggressively is not the same as using it responsibly.
The December arguments will be worth watching closely. The constitutional questions around due process and the Convention Against Torture are not minor procedural footnotes. They are the difference between a tough but defensible deportation policy and a system where the speed of removal is calibrated to outrun any meaningful legal challenge. If the administration wins in December on procedures as thin as what human rights groups are describing, the $7.5 million to Equatorial Guinea will look quaint compared to what comes next.
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