limbo

The Afghan man had fled the Taliban for refuge in upstate New York when U.S. immigration authorities ordered him deported to Uganda. The Cuban woman was working at a Texas Chick-fil-A when she was arrested after a minor traffic accident and told she was being sent to Ecuador.

There’s the Mauritanian man living in Michigan told he’d have to go to Uganda, the Venezuelan mother in Ohio told she’d be sent to Ecuador and the Bolivians, Ecuadorians and so many others across the country ordered sent to Honduras.

They are among more than 13,000 immigrants who were living legally in the U.S., waiting for rulings on asylum claims, when they suddenly faced so-called third-country deportation orders, destined for countries where most had no ties, according to the nonprofit group Mobile Pathways, which pushes for transparency in immigration proceedings.

Yet few have been deported, even as the White House pushes for ever more immigrant expulsions. Thanks to unexplained changes in U.S. policy, many are now mired in immigration limbo, unable to argue their asylum claims in court and unsure if they’ll be shackled and put on a deportation flight to a country they’ve never seen.

Some are in detention, though it’s unclear how many. All have lost permission to work legally, a right most had while pursuing their asylum claims, compounding the worry and dread that has rippled through immigrant communities.

And that may be the point.

“This administration’s goal is to instill fear into people. That’s the primary thing,” said Cassandra Charles, a senior staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, which has been fighting the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. The fear of being deported to an unknown country could, advocates believe, drive migrants to abandon their immigration cases and decide to return to their home countries.

Things may be changing.

In mid-March, top Immigration and Customs Enforcement legal officials told field attorneys with the Department of Homeland Security in an email to stop filing new motions for third-country deportations tied to asylum cases. The email, which has been seen by the Associated Press, did not give a reason. It has not been publicly released, and Homeland Security did not respond to requests to explain if the halt was permanent.

But the earlier deportation cases? Those are continuing.

An asylum seeker says she’s in panic over possibly being sent to a country she doesn’t know

In 2024, a Guatemalan woman who says she had been held captive and repeatedly sexually assaulted by members of a powerful gang arrived with her 4-year-old daughter at the U.S.-Mexico border and asked for asylum. She later discovered she was pregnant with another child, conceived during a rape.

In December, she sat in a San Francisco immigration courtroom and listened as an ICE attorney sought to have her deported.

The ICE attorney didn’t ask the judge that she be sent back to Guatemala. Instead, the attorney said, the woman from the Indigenous Guatemalan highlands would go to one of three countries: Ecuador, Honduras or across the globe to Uganda.

Until that moment, she’d never heard of Ecuador or Uganda.

“When I arrived in this country, I was filled with hope again and I thanked God for being alive,” the woman said after the hearing, her eyes filling with tears. “When I think about having to go to those other countries, I panic because I hear they are violent and dangerous.” She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from U.S. immigration authorities or the Guatemalan gang network.

There have been more than 13,000 removal orders for asylum seekers

ICE attorneys, the de facto prosecutors in immigration courts, were first instructed last summer to file motions known as “pretermissions” that end migrants’ asylum claims and allow them to be deported.

“They’re not saying the person doesn’t have a claim,” said Sarah Mehta, who tracks immigration issues at the American Civil Liberties Union. “They’re just saying, ‘We’re kicking this case completely out of court and we’re going to send that person to another country.’”

The pace of deportation orders picked up in October after a ruling from the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, which sets legal precedent inside the byzantine immigration court system.

The ruling from the three judges — two appointed by former Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and the third a holdover from the first Trump administration — cleared the way for migrants seeking asylum to be removed to any third country where the U.S. State Department determines they won’t face persecution or torture.

After the ruling, the government aggressively expanded the practice of ending asylum claims.

More than 13,000 migrants have been ordered deported to so-called “safe third countries” after their asylum cases were canceled, according to data from San Francisco-based Mobile Pathways. More than half the orders were for Honduras, Ecuador or Uganda, with the rest scattered among nearly three dozen other countries.

Deported migrants are free, at least theoretically, to pursue asylum and stay in those third countries, even if some have barely functioning asylum systems.

Deportations have been far more complicated than the government expected

Immigration authorities have released little information about the third-country agreements, known as Asylum Cooperative Agreements, or the deportees, and it’s unclear exactly how many have been deported to third countries as part of asylum removals.

According to Third Country Deportation Watch, a tracker run by the groups Refugees International and Human Rights First, fewer than 100 of them are thought to have been deported.

In a statement, Homeland Security called the agreements “lawful bilateral arrangements that allow illegal aliens seeking asylum in the United States to pursue protection in a partner country that has agreed to fairly adjudicate their claims.”

“DHS is using every lawful tool available to address the backlog and abuse of the asylum system,” said the statement, which was attributed only to a spokesperson. There are roughly 2 million backlogged asylum cases in the immigration system.

But deportations clearly turned out to be far more complicated than the government expected, restricted by a variety of legal challenges, the scope of the international agreements and a limited number of airplanes.

Mobile Pathways data, for example, shows that thousands of people have been ordered deported to Honduras — despite a diplomatic agreement that allows the country to take a total of just 10 such deportees per month for 24 months. Dozens of people ordered to Honduras in recent months did not speak Spanish as their primary language, but were native speakers of English, Uzbek and French, among other languages.

And while hundreds of asylum-seeking migrants have been ordered sent to Uganda, a top Ugandan official said none have arrived. U.S. authorities may be “doing a cost analysis” and trying to avoid dispatching flights with only a few people on board, Okello Oryem, the Ugandan minister of state for foreign affairs, told the Associated Press.

“You can’t be doing one, two people” at a time,” Oryem said. “Planeloads — that is the most effective way.”

Many immigration lawyers suspect that the March email ordering a halt in new asylum pretermissions could indicate a shift toward other forms of third-country deportations.

“Right now they haven’t been able to remove that many people,” said the ACLU’s Mehta. “I do think that will change.”

“They’re in a hiring spree right now. They will have more planes. If they get more agreements, they’ll be able to send more people to more countries.”

Sullivan writes for the Associated Press. AP reporters Garance Burke in San Francisco, Joshua Goodman in Miami, Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, Marlon González in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Molly A. Wallace in Chicago contributed to this report.

March 27 (UPI) — A tanker carrying Russian fuel initially headed to Cuba ended up docking in Venezuela after weeks of deviations, while a second oil-carrying vessel remains without a clear destination in the Caribbean amid the island nation’s energy crisis.

The vessel Sea Horse, sailing under the Hong Kong flag, had been closely tracked by maritime analysts since it departed from the eastern Mediterranean carrying between 190,000 and 200,000 barrels of Russian diesel initially destined for Cuba.

During its voyage, the tanker repeatedly changed its declared destination. It went from being listed as en route to Havana to indicating “Caribbean Sea” and later Trinidad and Tobago in a pattern that reflected growing uncertainty about its final destination.

Ultimately, the Sea Horse arrived at Puerto Cabello, in Venezuela, on Wednesday morning after nearly 50 days in transit.

The diversion occurred in a context of increasing pressure from the United States to restrict fuel supplies to Cuba, which is facing a severe energy crisis with recurring blackouts and oil shortages.

The case of the Sea Horse is not isolated. Maritime tracking data show that other vessels have altered their routes or avoided declaring final destinations in recent weeks, amid sanctions that explicitly exclude Cuba from relaxed sanctions for Russian oil trade.

The second vessel, the Russian tanker Anatoly Kolodkin, maintains its uncertainty.

The ship, which is carrying roughly 730,000 barrels of crude, continues in the Caribbean Atlantic without a publicly confirmed final destination.

The maritime tracking website VesselFinder shows the destination of the Anatoly Kolodkin as “Atlantic for order,” a designation used in the industry to indicate that the vessel is sailing without a publicly confirmed final destination.

On Tuesday, maritime intelligence analyst Michelle Wiese Bockmann told Politico that the vessel could arrive in Cuba in “two or three days,” although its trajectory remains without clear confirmation.

The most recent AIS tracking data indicate that the vessel is about 487 miles from Turks and Caicos, with an estimated arrival Monday. However, its current vectors do not point directly toward Cuba, reinforcing uncertainty about true destination.

The behavior of the Kolodkin raises questions in a highly monitored environment.

“There are details that just don’t add up,” said Evan Ellis, a professor at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.

“Given the U.S. naval and air assets in the area, the Russian tanker has to know it won’t get in undetected. The question is whether this is some kind of cat-and-mouse game, or if shifting expectations, possibly tied to developments in Cuba, have changed whether it believes it can enter unopposed,” he said.

“Maybe the deliberate attempt was meant to apply pressure, and then once it got a reaction, it was backing off,” he added.

For Ellis, the key point remains outside the public radar.

“The biggest story is what’s going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about,” he said.

The eventual arrival of the Kolodkin also could force a decision from Washington. Analysts cited by the Miami Herald say the options range from diplomatic pressure to a possible interception by the U.S. Navy or U.S. Coast Guard.

“At the end of the day, what we really have to watch for is what actually happens,” said Jorge Piñón, a senior research collaborator at the University of Texas Energy Institute.

Cuba imports about 60% of its energy and depends on external supplies to sustain its electrical system, making each shipment a critical factor within a scenario of growing geopolitical tension.