Thousands of asylum seekers are abandoning their cases as ICE seeks to take them to nations they are not from.
Willian Yacelga Benalcazar’s asylum case followed what has become a common pattern in immigration courts across the country: After he told a judge he was afraid to return to his home country, the judge ordered his deportation to another.
Yacelga, who said he was fleeing threats from gangs in Ecuador, is facing extradition to Honduras. By March, he had spent five months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, where he said he contracted the virus, had to fight for food and drink chlorinated water. So he asked to be extradited to his home country of Ecuador rather than continue to fight his case in the US
“I believe we lost the asylum case because the lawyer told me that I could be detained for three, four more months. I was already sick there. I couldn’t take it anymore,” Yacelga told CBS News from Ecuador, speaking in Spanish during a phone interview.
“What I wanted was to get out, to be free, because it’s bad to be locked up there,” he added.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told CBS News that Benalcazar entered the US illegally and was deported to Ecuador on April 16.
The Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to deport asylum seekers to third countries have stalled thousands of immigration cases and scared thousands more into giving up seeking asylum, according to a CBS News analysis of newly released data and interviews with lawyers and immigration policy experts.
Third-country deportations “have more to do with fear than moderation,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. based in Washington, DC.
About 17,500 people have been deported to third countries since President Trump took office, according to an estimate by Third Country Deportation Watch, a monitoring group run by the non-profit organization Refugees International and Human Rights First. Most were sent to Mexico. That number is about 2% of the total number of deportations by border czar Tom Homan he told CBS News have been done when Mr. Trump’s second term so far.
Too many have faced the threat of deportation to a third country. By sweeping, for a whole month campaignmore than 75,500 asylum cases received a motion to be “preempted,” or terminated without a merits hearing, according to a CBS News report on immigration court data.
These proposals were rare until October 2025, when the Board of Immigration Appeals, an appellate body in the US immigration court system, ruled that immigration judges must decide on third-country removal proposals before considering whether a person is eligible for asylum. These countries have signed “asylum cooperation agreements” with the Trump administration that allow the US to deport asylum seekers there, forcing them to take refuge outside American soil.
After that decision, immigration lawyers say that almost every asylum seeker they represent must now argue that they fear persecution not only in their own country, but in foreign countries such as Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala and Uganda.
ICE did not respond to CBS News’ request for comment about its efforts to send asylum seekers to third countries or about detention conditions.
In cases where a waiver was filed, about 16% of asylum seekers — or about 12,300 people — withdrew or abandoned their asylum claims or voluntarily agreed to leave the US, immigration court data through March 31 shows.
“The third countries from which people are removed are often the most dangerous countries themselves that do not have a functioning asylum system,” said Victoria Neilson, managing attorney at the National Immigration Project. “There are many reasons why people are afraid, I think choose the devil you know rather than the one you know nothing about.”
Asylum cases in limbo
More than 24,000 people have received removal orders to third countries the US has asylum cooperation agreements with after filing a petition to end their case, immigration court data show. ICE did not disclose how many were actually removed, and did not respond to CBS News’ questions about the figure. Some, like Yacelga, may want to return to their countries anyway.
Immigration lawyers told CBS News they doubt what will happen to deporting so many people to third countries under the accords. Honduras, for example, has only agreed to accept 10 non-Honduran deportees per month, but more than 6,300 non-Hondurans had a deportation order from that country in late March after receiving a motion to withdraw their case. About 60 had been removed to Honduras by late April, according to Third Country Deportation Watch.
“I believe what we are seeing now is the inevitable result of forcing judges to order immigrants deported to third countries that have refused to accept them,” said Adriana Heffley, an immigration attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. “There are thousands of people now with eviction orders that cannot be enforced.”
In mid-March, ICE lawyers received an email instructing them not to file new motions for a hearing, the Seattle Times reported, but that cases where motions had already been filed could proceed. DHS did not respond to CBS News’ request for comment on the memo.
A federal lawsuit against the practice of terminating asylum cases under third-country treaties is pending, accusing the federal government of undermining due process and arguing that signatory countries have inadequate asylum systems.
About 13,300 cases — more than half of those with third-country removal orders — are also on hold while those immigrants appeal their removal, immigration court data show, as an appeal puts a hold on deportation. The BIA, which makes the final decision, decided less than 1% of appeals by the end of March. Last year, the board took an average of two years to issue a decision on the case, the data show.
Under the current administration, the BIA’s precedent-setting, public decisions have been more favorable DHS.
It deals with the release of third countries from detention
For those with third-country removal orders in detention — about 1,800 people as of late March, according to immigration court data — the indefinite wait for an appeal decision can be worse than the threat of deportation., say lawyers and lawyers. BIA conversions are faster for those incarcerated, but still about 10 months ahead of last year, the data show.
Before Yacelga dropped his asylum case, he was transferred between five detention centers spread across the country and handcuffed all day during the transfer, he told CBS News. He spent most of his time in Eloy, Arizona, thousands of miles from his wife, children and legal team in New York, and said that for more than a month, his family and lawyer did not know where he was. The judge denied his request for detention.
“Unless a federal court steps in and says their detention is unreasonable or illegal and they release them — if not, they’ll keep you there,” said Carlos Trujillo, an immigration attorney in Provo, Utah. “It’s a mental battle to try to push you to give up.”
In a statement sent to CBS News, a DHS spokesperson said Yacelga crossed the US-Mexico border illegally in August 2023 and was ordered deported to Ecuador last month by an immigration judge. A DHS spokesperson added that Yacelga was arrested for possession of stolen property.
“President Trump’s message was clear: illegal criminals are not welcome in the US. If you come to our country and break our laws, we will find you, arrest you and deport you,” the spokesman wrote.
Yacelga said he has never been prosecuted. Charges were pending at the time of his arrest, data from ICE shows.
Nearly two weeks after being deported to Ecuador, Yacelga told CBS News that he is having trouble sleeping and is still battling symptoms of a virus he contracted while in prison, which left him too ill to find work.
“Everything, all the money I received, everything I had, I left to them so that they could live while I was incarcerated,” he said in Spanish to his family in New York. “What I want is to forget all that and start over because it was painful to be arrested when you didn’t commit a crime, you just want to, try to take care of your family.”
About the data
CBS News analyzed data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) regarding immigration court procedures for those with asylum cases as of Jan. 1, 2025, until March 31, 2026. Although the data does not specify whether requests for early postponement were made on the grounds of asylum agreements or in response separate BIA ruleinterviews with several immigration attorneys and data from the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies shows that most of the proposals for early admission submitted in the last few months were made to achieve that third country removal. Furthermore, although the data includes the date of the decision to leave voluntarily, it does not include a date field for when the asylum application was withdrawn. Interviews with immigration attorneys and an analysis of previous data releases from EOIR suggest that most revocations occur after pre-admission applications are filed.
