Paraguay Accepts First US Third-Country Deportees Under Safe-Third-Country Agreement

On April 21–23, 2026, Paraguay accepted approximately 16 third-country deportees from five South American nations and Spain under a 'safe third country' bilateral agreement it had signed with the United States in August 2025. The deportation to Paraguay came days after a separate April 17 incident in which 15 people from South American countries were deported by ICE to the Democratic Republic of Congo — a country the US State Department itself warned had 'civil unrest' — drawing widespread legal challenges and international condemnation. By May 2026, the Trump administration had deployed third-country deportations to at least 21 countries under bilateral agreements, with 17,500+ individuals sent to countries they had no prior connection to. Human rights observers noted the historical irony: the US was mass-deporting people from countries whose instability was partly a legacy of decades of US military interventions and CIA-backed coups, while doing so through bilateral deals that re-created a regional system of US-enforced migration control critics compared to the Monroe Doctrine's logic applied to migration.