The controversial third-country deportation policy from the Trump administration has impacted Massachusetts detainees, including several of the original plaintiffs in the federal case against it. Now, a Supreme Court decision is allowing it to move forward once again, even while justices consider whether the policy is legal.
The National Immigration Litigation Alliance, Human Rights First and Northwest Immigrant Rights Project’s case — D.V.D v. DHS — challenges the policy of deporting immigrants with final deportation orders to countries they have little to no affiliation with, known as “third countries,” without meaningful notice or ability to dispute the decision. It was originally filed in Massachusetts federal district court.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday, however, granted an emergency request from the Trump administration seeking to resume deporting immigrants with final deportation orders to third countries.
The policy is “currently in effect,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance.
“However, the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the third-country policy to continue was made on the shadow docket,” she said. “It was made without any explanation, so we don’t know the reason that the Supreme Court let the policy continue. But that doesn’t mean that the court held the policy is lawful.” Shadow dockets are emergency orders and decisions outside of a court’s standard schedule. The Supreme Court said it will hear oral arguments in December on the broader case.
Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival lauded the court’s decision in an emailed statement from the agency. “A bad day for criminal illegals and open borders activists alike,” he wrote, urging immigrants to self-deport.
The Trump administration has used this as a deportation tactic for detainees who can’t legally be deported back to their countries of origin because they have proven or shown it’s highly likely they’ll be persecuted if they return. The countries that have brokered third-country agreements with the Trump administration have asserted they won’t torture or violate the rights of deported immigrants from the U.S.
Detainees in Massachusetts say they’ve often been compelled to sign paperwork related to third-country deportation against their will.
One man, A.S., told GBH News that when he was detained at Plymouth’s ICE detention facility last winter, he felt pressure to self-deport to his North African country or be sent to a country with a third-country agreement that he had never been to: Uganda. GBH News isn’t using his name due to his fear of being detained again.
“They would keep saying, ‘Oh, you’re from Africa, so it might be Uganda.’ They were telling me like, ‘You can be in Uganda.’ I was like, ‘Man, I don’t speak the language. You can’t just send me there,’” he recounted. A.S. was eventually released from detention to his family in southeastern Massachusetts.
Countries that have agreements with the Trump administration include Eswatini, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, Central African Republic, Liberia and Mexico.
Massachusetts residents are two of the four plaintiffs
Plaintiff D.V.D. is a Cuban immigrant and resident of Pittsfield, according to the federal complaint. He had a deportation order from 2017, with Cuba being the only country designated for him to be removed to. He has checked in regularly at ICE’s Burlington facility since 2019. In March 2025, ICE required another check-in only weeks after a previous one, making him wary of being detained and deported to a third country.
Plaintiff E.F.D. is from Ecuador and was a resident of Milford. In 2018, an immigration judge granted his application for protection from deportation to Ecuador, under the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture. He initially came to the U.S. years earlier after refusing to transport drugs for the Ecuadorian police, which resulted in robbery and threats on his life. In March 2025, ICE detained E.F.D. and his coworkers when their search for another individual was unsuccessful. He was detained at Plymouth’s ICE detention center, and eventually released after the lawsuit was filed.
“It’s had a devastating effect on them, on their family, their friends and their communities, because many of our class members have been living in the United States, living law-abiding lives for decades,” said Realmuto of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance.
Sarah Sherman-Stokes, associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clinic at Boston University School of Law, had one Massachusetts client deported to a third country under the current Trump administration. He isn’t part of the federal lawsuit.
The man fled Cuba with his politically active family as a teenager, and sought refuge in the U.S. Before being detained, he had been in the U.S. for over two decades, had six U.S.-citizen children and owned a business. He heard Cuban immigrants were being sent to third countries, tried to cross the border to Canada, and was detained. The man was also held at Plymouth County’s ICE detention facility.
Sherman-Stokes said she wasn’t notified about an interview to gauge his fear of being sent to Mexico. “I wasn’t able to be present at the interview, which we believe was a violation of his rights,” she said.
He was then deported to Mexico in November 2025.
“It’s like a sort of classic playbook of the United States offloading people onto other countries. Then the United States says, ‘We are completely not responsible for whatever happens next.’ So, in many of these places, people are detained, they’re tortured — they’re sent back to their original country from which they have protection. It’s really sinister,” she explained.
Other attorneys spoke to GBH News about clients who were also deported to third countries, but were afraid to have their names published due to fear of public and government retribution.
“The ICE deportation officers at Wyatt or at Stratford or Plymouth will kind of use the third country as like a threat, you know, to get people to do things,” said one attorney referring to detention facilities in Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Massachusetts where local detainees often end up. “To accept removal to their home country — it comes up to scare people.”
Another attorney said their clients are class members of the D.V.D litigation.
“There’s a lot of dealings that happen with immigration agents behind the scenes without attorneys present, where clients are being pressured to sign documents related to their removal to a third country,” the local attorney said. “Where they’re not being affirmatively asked if they’re afraid to go to that country, and basically are being set up for an expeditious removal to that country.”
Case history
The case has a complicated and long history.
Shortly after it was filed in March 2025, U.S. District Court of Massachusetts Judge Brian Murphy issued a temporary restraining order blocking third-country removals without notice or meaningful opportunity to seek protection under the Convention Against Torture.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston allowed that to stand. The request for a nationwide class was granted by the District Court. In May 2025, a planned deportation flight to Libya — a third country — using a military plane was blocked, as the court said it would breach the ongoing injunction. Then, the Department of Homeland Security began to deport a group of detainees to South Sudan, and Murphy of the District of Massachusetts held that the earlier order was violated.
Those men were held in a converted shipping container in Djibouti. The government tried to stay the injunction with an emergency application with the Supreme Court. In June 2025, the Supreme Court granted the stay of the previous injunction, but offered no reasoning for why it did.
The District Court of Massachusetts since granted final judgment on the case in February 2026, ruling that deportees must be given more due process before removing them to the third countries. In September, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that DHS must offer detained immigrants “a meaningful opportunity” to contest any deportation to a country where they have no connection.
Justices Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor have written a dissent in response.
