“Trump’s deportation strategy increasingly includes flying illegal immigrants to ‘third countries’”, 18 September 2026 (Photo via Washington Examiner — the original report)
As it ran on the front
Sorry — it's in the coat. Everything's in the coat. Here. This.
It's a claim stub. Impound lot. Ticket number across the top, address of the lot across the bottom, hours under that, nine to four, closed Sundays. They towed my car Tuesday. Terrible car, needs a fan belt, and now it needs storage at a daily rate, which I'm told is standard. But look what this little piece of paper does. The city took a thing of mine, and then the city printed where it put it. One page. That's the whole arrangement. I didn't have to know anybody. I didn't have to file anything.…
…(cont) I bring it up on account of something I read this morning, and I've got it here — no, that's the inspection slip — hang on — here.
The Washington Post, today's paper: "Immigrants with final deportation orders disappear from ICE detainee locator." And underneath, their sentence, not mine, I copied it out because I didn't want to get it wrong — the change "will make it harder for many families and attorneys to determine where an immigrant is being held after being taken into ICE custody."
Held. That's the word they use. And where, well — that's what the page was for.
Now here's where I get slow, and I apologize. Same morning, other paper. The New York Times: "They Had No Connection to Costa Rica. America Sent Them There Anyway." The Times says this third-country business undermines a bedrock notion of international law going back seventy-five years. Seventy-five. That's a long time for a notion to sit there without anybody kicking it.
And it's not two fellas and a suitcase. CBS, the fourteenth of this month — their correspondent is filing from Liberia, which they describe as one of more than thirty nations receiving people from us. Thirty. I couldn't name thirty nations on a bet.
Then I found the one from the first of September, Democracy Now, and this is the one I had to read twice. They say dozens of people have gone to the Central African Republic. And they say some of those people had previously been granted protections — granted, that's an official act, somebody signed that — because they risk facing torture in their home countries. And they point out that the State Department warns American citizens not to travel to the Central African Republic. So one department tells me not to go, and the flights go anyway.
And I want to be fair here, so I went and got the other side's paper. Washington Examiner, the eighteenth. They're not complaining. They say Homeland Security and State secured deals with countries worldwide, and the word they use is accelerate. That's the friendly description. Acceleration.
So Tuesday I take the bus out to the lot, because the car's at the lot, that's the joke of it. Man behind the glass. I slide him the stub, he reads four digits off the top, types them with two fingers, and says: row eleven. Row eleven. A municipal employee making eighteen an hour can tell me, in under a minute, the row number of a nineteen-year-old car with a bad belt. And on the same paper, in the same week, a page that told a lawyer which building held a person goes quiet.
Excuse me — before you go. Just the one, then I'll let you be.
My stub has a row on it. For a car. Their story has a phrase in it. For a person. It's the Times's phrase, it's in the headline, and it's the same phrase CBS used on the fourteenth about all thirty-some countries. Would you read it back to me? Because I've written it down twice now and I want to be sure I copied it right, and I'd hate to be the one who got it wrong: no connection.
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“They're not just moving people out of the country, they're moving them out of the paperwork — same week they expand shipping folks to thirty-some countries they've got no tie to, the page families and lawyers used to find them goes dark. Democracy Now says some of those people had protections because they'd face torture back home, and now they're in a country the State Department tells American tourists to stay out of. You can look up a towed Buick by ticket number; try looking up your kid's father.”
“The locator was never intended as a tracking service for — did I say that? That doesn't sound like me. These are final orders, they've had their process, and the receiving countries are sovereign partners, more than thirty of them, which the Examiner correctly calls accelerating, so I'd call that diplomacy. Nobody's hiding anybody, the information is fully available through the appropriate channels, and I'd name the channel for you but honestly that's a question for the department.”
The Trump administration has moved to accelerate deportations by securing deals with countries worldwide to receive individuals deported from the United States who are not originally from their destinations. Through a process known as third-country deportations or third-country removals, the departments of Homeland Security and State…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
