On 14 June 2025, Mario Guevara, a Salvadoran reporter, arrived at a protest in Atlanta, Georgia, notebook in hand. He was covering demonstrations against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE. He did not leave as a journalist. He was detained, held for months, and eventually deported to El Salvador — a country he had fled.

His case is not an isolated one, but it is a precise illustration of the climate in which the Trump administration has conducted one of the most ambitious mass-deportation programmes in modern American history. Since January 2025, more than 25,400 people have been removed from the United States and sent to countries that most of them had never set foot in. Many held legal protections — formally recognised by American authorities — that were supposed to prevent their removal to places where they faced persecution. To circumvent those protections, Washington negotiated agreements with 35 so-called "third countries", nations willing to receive deportees who were not their own citizens.

What these governments received in return has not been made public; the negotiations were conducted largely in secret. To bring those arrangements into the light, the Forbidden Stories network assembled 72 journalists from 26 media outlets across 15 countries. Over six months, the team conducted more than a hundred interviews, including 33 direct testimonies from deported migrants. The investigation, titled "The Deportation Project", follows individuals who were abandoned in countries as unfamiliar to them as Ghana, Cameroon, and Eswatini — African nations that signed 12 of the 35 bilateral deals with Washington.