Willian Yacelga Benalcazar's asylum case followed what had become a similar pattern in immigration courts across the country: After telling a judge he feared returning to his home country, the judge ordered his deportation to another one. 

Yacelga, who said he fled threats from criminal gangs in Ecuador, was facing removal to Honduras. By March, he had spent five months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, where he said he caught a virus, had to fight for food and drank water contaminated with chlorine. So he asked to be sent back to his native Ecuador rather than continue to fight his case in the U.S.

"I believe we abandoned the asylum case because the lawyer told me I could be in detention for three, four additional months. I was already sick in there. I couldn't take it anymore," Yacelga told CBS News from Ecuador, speaking in Spanish during a phone interview.

"All I wanted was to get out, to be free, because it's horrible being locked up in there," he added.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told CBS News Benalcazar entered the U.S. 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 immigrants' cases and scared thousands more into giving up their asylum claims, according to a CBS News analysis of recently released federal data and interviews with attorneys and immigration policy experts. 

Third-country deportations "have more to do with fear than scale," said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.

About 17,500 people have been deported to third countries since President Trump returned to office, according to an estimate from Third Country Deportation Watch, a monitoring group operated by the nonprofits Refugees International and Human Rights First. The vast majority were sent to Mexico. That number is about 2% of the total deportations border czar Tom Homan told CBS News have been carried out during Mr. Trump's second term so far. 

Far more have faced the threat of being deported to a third country. In a sweeping, monthslong campaign, more than 75,500 asylum cases received a motion to "pretermit," or terminate proceedings without a hearing on the merits, according to a CBS News analysis of immigration court data. 

These motions were relatively rare until October 2025, when the Board of Immigration Appeals, the appellate body in the U.S. immigration court system, ruled that immigration judges should decide on motions for third-country removal before considering whether someone qualifies for asylum. These countries have signed "asylum cooperative agreements" with the Trump administration that allow the U.S. to re-route asylum-seekers there, forcing them to seek refuge outside of American soil.

After that decision, immigration attorneys said nearly every asylum-seeker they represented now had to argue they feared persecution not only in their home country, but in third-party nations like 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 facility conditions. 

In cases where a motion to pretermit was filed, about 16% of asylum-seekers — or roughly 12,300 people — withdrew or abandoned their asylum claims or agreed to voluntarily depart the U.S., immigration court data through March 31 shows.

"The third countries people are being removed to are often very dangerous countries themselves that don't have a functioning asylum system," said Victoria Neilson, supervising attorney at the National Immigration Project. "There's a lot of reasons for people to be afraid and I guess choose the devil you know over the one you know nothing about."

Asylum cases in limbo

More than 24,000 people received removal orders to third countries the U.S. has asylum cooperative agreements with after a motion to pretermit their case was filed, the immigration court data shows. ICE has not disclosed how many have been actually removed, and did not respond to CBS News inquiries about the figure. Some, as Yacelga did, may seek to return to their home countries anyway.

Immigration attorneys told CBS News they are doubtful that it will be feasible to deport so many people to third countries under the agreements. 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 to that country by the end of March after receiving a motion to pretermit their case. About 60 had been removed to Honduras as of late April, according to Third Country Deportation Watch. 

"I believe what we're seeing now is the inevitable result of forcing judges to order immigrants deported to third countries that have not agreed to accept them," said Adriana Heffley, the legal director of the Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network. "There are thousands of people now with deportation orders that cannot be carried out." 

In mid-March, ICE attorneys received an email directing them not to file new motions to pretermit cases, The Seattle Times reported, but that cases where motions had already been filed could continue. DHS did not respond to CBS News' request for comment on the memo.

A federal lawsuit against the practice of pretermitting asylum cases under the third-country agreements is currently pending, accusing the federal government of subverting due process and arguing the countries it has signed agreements with have inadequate asylum systems.

About 13,300 cases — more than half of those with third-country removal orders — are also stalled while those immigrants appeal their removal, immigration court data shows, as an appeal puts a pause on deportation. The BIA, which makes the final decision, decided less than 1% of the appeals by the end of March. Last year, the board took an average of two years to rule on a case decision appeal, the data shows.

Under the current administration, BIA decisions that set a precedent, which are public, have been overwhelmingly in favor of DHS.

Facing third-country removal from detention

For those with third-country removal orders in detention — about 1,800 people as of the end of March, according to immigration court data — waiting indefinitely for an appeal ruling can be worse than the threat of deportation, advocates and lawyers say. The BIA's turnaround is faster for those in detention, but still averaged about 10 months last year, the data shows. 

Before Yacelga gave up his asylum case, he was transferred between five detention facilities spread across the country and handcuffed for an entire day during some of the transfers, 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 he said that for over a month, his family and attorney didn't know where he was. A judge denied his request to bond out of detention.

"Unless a federal court steps in and says that their detention is unreasonable or illegal and they release them — otherwise, they will keep you there," said Carlos Trujillo, an immigration attorney in Provo, Utah. "It's the psychological warfare of trying to push you to just give up." 

In a statement to CBS News, a DHS spokesperson said Yacelga crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in August 2023 and that he was ordered deported to Ecuador last month by immigration judge. The DHS spokesperson added that Yacelga was arrested for larceny and criminal possession of stolen property. 

"President Trump's message has been clear: criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S. If you come to our country and break our laws, we will find you, arrest you, and deport you," the spokesperson wrote.

Yacelga said he was never prosecuted. The charges were pending when he was detained, data from ICE indicates.

About two weeks after his deportation to Ecuador, Yacelga told CBS News he struggles to sleep and still battles symptoms from the virus he caught in detention, which has left him too sick to find a job.

"Everything, all the money I had earned, everything I had, I left it with them so they could survive during the time I was detained," he said in Spanish, referring to his family in New York. "What I want is to forget all that and start over because it was horrible being imprisoned without having committed any crime, just for wanting to, well, try to take care of your family."

About the data

CBS News analyzed data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) on immigration court proceedings for those with asylum cases from Jan. 1, 2025, through March 31, 2026. While the data does not specify whether motions to pretermit are made on the grounds of asylum cooperative agreements or in response to a different BIA ruling, interviews with several immigration attorneys and data from the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies indicate that the vast majority of pretermission motions filed over the last several months have been made in pursuit of such third-country removals. Further, while the data includes the date of a voluntary departure decision, it does not include a date field for when an asylum application was withdrawn. Interviews with immigration attorneys and an analysis of previous data releases from EOIR suggest most withdrawals took place after a pretermission motion was filed.