Yes, the U.S. government has been sending immigrants to countries they have never set foot in, have no family in, and may not even speak the language of — and a federal judge just wrote 81 pages explaining why that is illegal. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, sitting in the District of Massachusetts, ruled on February 25, 2026, that the Trump administration’s third-country deportation policy violates federal immigration law, the Due Process Clause of the Constitution, and the Convention Against Torture as implemented into U.S. law.
His ruling documented something remarkable even by the standards of high-stakes immigration litigation: government officials who lied to the court, stonewalled discovery, and defied prior court orders, including sending at least six people to South Sudan after being told not to. But here is the complication. Despite the force of Murphy’s ruling, higher courts have allowed the policy to continue. The First Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Murphy’s order on March 12, 2026, in a 2-1 decision, and the Supreme Court has now intervened twice on its emergency docket to keep third-country deportations going while the case moves through appellate review. Hundreds of people have already been removed to countries including Rwanda, Ghana, Uganda, Eswatini, Honduras, and South Sudan. This article breaks down the legal reasoning in Murphy’s 81-page opinion, where deportees have actually been sent, how the appeals process has unfolded, and what the current state of the law is as of March 2026.
Table of Contents
- Can the Government Legally Send You to a Country You’ve Never Been To?
- Where Have Deportees Actually Been Sent Under This Policy?
- What Judge Murphy Actually Found in His 81-Page Ruling
- The Appeals Court Stay and What It Means Going Forward
- The Constitutional Questions That Remain Unresolved
- The Government Misconduct That Could Shape the Outcome
- What Comes Next in This Legal Battle
- Conclusion
Can the Government Legally Send You to a Country You’ve Never Been To?
Under existing federal immigration law, the answer has historically been no — at least not without meaningful procedural protections. When the government issues a removal order, the default is deportation to a person’s country of origin or nationality. There are provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act for removal to alternative countries, but those provisions come with requirements: the government generally must designate a country with some connection to the individual, and the person must have an opportunity to contest the designation. Judge Murphy’s ruling hinged on this framework. He found that the Trump administration had effectively bypassed it, negotiating bilateral agreements with countries like Rwanda, Uganda, and Honduras to accept deportees in bulk, regardless of whether any individual deportee had ever lived in, traveled to, or had any connection whatsoever to those nations. The comparison to ordinary deportation practice is stark. If a Guatemalan national is ordered removed, they are sent to Guatemala.
Under the third-country policy, that same person could theoretically end up in Rwanda or Eswatini — countries on a different continent, with different languages, different legal systems, and no support network waiting for them. Murphy wrote that the government cannot treat human beings as interchangeable cargo to be routed to whichever country has agreed to accept a delivery. The policy, he found, strips individuals of any meaningful ability to prepare for or challenge their removal, which is exactly the kind of government action the Due Process Clause was designed to prevent. What makes this case legally distinctive is that Murphy did not merely rule on procedural grounds. He went further, finding that the policy also violates the Convention Against Torture’s implementing regulations, which prohibit removal to a country where an individual faces a substantial risk of torture. When the government sends someone to a country they have no connection to — a country whose conditions may be entirely unknown to them — the individual has no meaningful way to raise a CAT claim. They do not know what dangers they might face in a place they have never been.
Where Have Deportees Actually Been Sent Under This Policy?
The geography of third-country deportations reveals how expansive the policy has become. Documented destinations include Rwanda, Ghana, Eswatini (the small southern African nation formerly known as Swaziland), South Sudan, Cameroon, Honduras, and Uganda. These are not random selections. The Trump administration negotiated agreements with each of these governments, essentially paying them to accept deportees from the United States who are nationals of other countries entirely. Honduras, for instance, agreed to take up to 200 deportees from other Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, including families with children. Uganda agreed to accept deportees from other African nations. The logic, from the administration’s perspective, was efficiency: if a home country will not accept its nationals back quickly, send them somewhere that will.
However, there is a critical limitation that Murphy’s ruling underscored. These agreements are between governments, not between governments and the individuals being deported. The deportees themselves had no say, no notice, and in many cases no idea where they were going until they were on a plane. At least six class members in Murphy’s case were sent to South Sudan — a country in the grip of a devastating civil war and humanitarian crisis — in what Murphy called a “willful violation” of a prior court order that should have prevented exactly that. South Sudan is widely recognized as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for civilians, which raises the Convention against Torture issue in its most extreme form. A separate but related case involved roughly 137 Venezuelan men who were sent not to a third country in the traditional sense but to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. That case, overseen by Judge James Boasberg, has its own procedural history, but it illustrates the same underlying dynamic: the government asserting broad authority to send noncitizens to places they have no connection to, under legal theories that many federal judges have found deeply problematic. The Venezuelan CECOT transfers happened in March 2025 and became one of the early flashpoints in the broader legal battle over deportation policy.
What Judge Murphy Actually Found in His 81-Page Ruling
Murphy’s February 25, 2026, opinion is notable not just for its length but for its tone. Federal judges, particularly district judges, tend to write in measured, procedural language even when they disagree with the government. Murphy did not entirely abandon that convention, but he came close. He wrote that the administration’s policy “is not fine, nor is it legal” — a direct rebuke of government attorneys who had argued that the policy was a lawful exercise of executive discretion in immigration enforcement. The ruling rests on three independent legal bases. First, Murphy found that the policy violates federal immigration statutes, which require the government to first attempt removal to an individual’s home country before considering alternatives, and which provide procedural protections when alternative countries are designated.
Second, he found a Due Process Clause violation: the government was depriving people of liberty (by sending them to unfamiliar countries with no support) without providing notice or an opportunity to be heard. Third, he found violations of the Convention Against Torture’s implementing provisions, because individuals cannot meaningfully assess or raise claims about torture risk in a country they know nothing about. Perhaps most damaging to the government’s position was Murphy’s extensive documentation of official misconduct during the litigation itself. He found that government officials had lied to the court about the status of deportation flights, stonewalled legitimate discovery requests, and — most egregiously — violated a prior court order by sending class members to South Sudan while the case was pending. This is the kind of finding that can influence appellate judges even if they disagree with some of the district court’s legal conclusions. Courts take violations of their own orders seriously, and Murphy laid out the evidence in painstaking detail.
The Appeals Court Stay and What It Means Going Forward
On March 12, 2026, the First Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-1 decision staying Murphy’s ruling, which means the third-country deportation policy can continue operating while the appeal proceeds. The majority consisted of Judge Howard, a George W. Bush appointee, and Judge Aframe, a Biden appointee — a bipartisan panel that lent the decision additional weight. Judge Montecalvo, also a Biden appointee, dissented. The tradeoff in any stay decision is between two risks. On one side is the risk of irreparable harm to the individuals being deported to countries they have no connection to — harm that is, by definition, difficult or impossible to undo once someone has been flown to South Sudan or Rwanda.
On the other side is the government’s claimed interest in enforcing its immigration policy without judicial interference while the legal questions are being resolved. The First Circuit majority concluded that the government had shown a sufficient likelihood of success on the merits and that the balance of equities favored allowing the policy to continue. Four days later, on March 16, the court issued an additional order expediting the appellate schedule, signaling that it wants to resolve the legal questions quickly. For the people subject to third-country removal, the practical effect is straightforward and grim: the policy remains in force. Murphy’s 81-page opinion is now a persuasive legal document rather than an enforceable one, at least until the First Circuit rules on the merits or the Supreme Court takes the case again. The Supreme Court has already intervened twice on its emergency docket — once in June 2025 in *DHS v. D.V.D.*, when it allowed third-country removals to continue pending litigation — and there is every reason to expect it will weigh in again.
The Constitutional Questions That Remain Unresolved
The deepest unresolved question in this litigation is whether the Constitution imposes any limit on the government’s power to choose where it sends a deportee. The government’s position, in its most aggressive form, is that once an individual has been ordered removed, the executive branch has broad discretion over the mechanics of removal, including the destination country. Under this theory, the government need not try the home country first, need not provide notice of the intended destination, and need not give the individual any opportunity to object. The limitation of this argument is that it proves too much. If the government can send anyone to any country without process, there is no principled reason it could not send a Mexican national to North Korea or a Honduran asylum seeker to a country in active genocide. Murphy recognized this problem explicitly.
Due process is not an all-or-nothing proposition; it requires that the procedures be proportional to the stakes. And the stakes here — being deposited in a foreign country with no resources, no language skills, no contacts, and potentially no legal status — are about as high as they get short of imprisonment. The government has not seriously argued that these individuals would have legal residency rights in the receiving countries; in many cases, they would arrive as undocumented foreigners in nations with their own immigration enforcement. There is also the unresolved interaction between the Alien Enemies Act and modern due process jurisprudence. The 137 Venezuelan men sent to CECOT in El Salvador were removed under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law designed for wartime. Whether that statute can constitutionally authorize peacetime removals to foreign prisons is a question that may eventually reach the Supreme Court on its own track. For now, these parallel cases are creating a patchwork of district court and appellate rulings that point in different directions, which is precisely the kind of circuit split that attracts Supreme Court review.
The Government Misconduct That Could Shape the Outcome
Appellate courts do not usually revisit factual findings in detail, but Murphy’s documentation of government misconduct may prove to be a factor that is hard to ignore. The finding that officials sent six class members to South Sudan in willful violation of a court order is not a routine discovery dispute or a paperwork error. It is the kind of conduct that can shift a court’s institutional posture from deference to skepticism.
When the government tells an appellate panel that it can be trusted to exercise its deportation authority responsibly, Murphy’s factual record provides a ready counterexample. The lying-to-the-court finding is similarly significant. Federal litigation depends on the government’s representations being truthful; when they are not, courts have tools to respond, including sanctions, adverse inferences, and — most relevant here — a diminished willingness to credit the government’s assurances in future proceedings. Whether the First Circuit or the Supreme Court will engage with these findings remains to be seen, but they are now part of the permanent record of this case.
What Comes Next in This Legal Battle
The case is now on an expedited schedule at the First Circuit, which means a merits decision could come within months rather than the year or more that appellate cases sometimes take. If the First Circuit affirms Murphy, the government will almost certainly seek Supreme Court review. If the First Circuit reverses, the plaintiffs will face the same choice. Either way, this case appears headed for a definitive ruling from the nation’s highest court on whether the government can deport people to countries they have no connection to. What happens in the meantime is the harder question.
With the stay in place, deportation flights to third countries can continue. Each flight creates new facts on the ground — individuals deposited in foreign countries who may be effectively impossible to locate or return, even if the courts ultimately rule the policy unlawful. Murphy recognized this in his opinion, which is why he initially ordered the government to first try home-country deportation and provide notice before any third-country removal. The First Circuit’s stay removed those guardrails. The result is a legal landscape where a policy that one federal judge has declared unconstitutional, unlawful, and implemented through official deception continues to operate because higher courts have not yet spoken on the merits.
Conclusion
Judge Murphy’s 81-page ruling is one of the most detailed judicial examinations of a deportation policy in recent memory. It found that the Trump administration’s third-country removal program violates federal immigration law, the Due Process Clause, and the Convention Against Torture — and that government officials lied to the court and defied court orders in the process. On the law, the ruling is thorough and well-supported. On the facts, it is damning.
But as of March 2026, it is not enforceable. The First Circuit’s stay means the policy continues while the courts work through the appeal. Hundreds of people have already been sent to countries including Rwanda, Uganda, Honduras, South Sudan, and Ghana — places where they have no ties, no support, and in some cases face serious danger. The legal question of whether the government can do this is now moving toward a definitive answer, but that answer will come too late for many of the people already removed. This case is worth following closely, because whatever the appellate courts decide will set the boundaries of government deportation power for years to come.