More than 12,000 asylum-seekers gave up claims or agreed to leave as ICE pursued third-country removals, a CBS News analysis found.
More than 12,000 asylum-seekers withdrew or abandoned their claims, or agreed to voluntarily leave the United States, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement moved to end their cases by seeking deportation to countries they were not from, according to a CBS News analysis of federal immigration court data.
The analysis found that more than 75,500 asylum cases received motions to “pretermit,” a legal step that seeks to terminate proceedings without a hearing on the merits. In cases where such a motion was filed, about 16% of asylum-seekers — roughly 12,300 people — gave up their claims or agreed to depart, CBS reported, citing immigration court data through March 31.
The shift follows an October 2025 Board of Immigration Appeals decision directing immigration judges to consider motions for third-country removal before deciding whether a person qualifies for asylum. The countries involved have signed asylum cooperative agreements with the Trump administration, allowing the U.S. to route some asylum-seekers there instead of hearing their claims on U.S. soil.
The result has been a wave of cases in which immigrants who say they fear returning home are instead ordered removed to another country. Willian Yacelga Benalcazar, an Ecuadorian man who said he fled threats from criminal gangs, was facing removal to Honduras. After five months in ICE detention, he asked to be sent back to Ecuador rather than continue fighting his case.
“I believe we abandoned the asylum case because the lawyer told me I could be in detention for three, four additional months,” Yacelga told CBS News from Ecuador in Spanish. “I was already sick in there. I couldn't take it anymore.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told CBS that Yacelga entered the U.S. illegally and was deported to Ecuador on April 16. The spokesperson also said he had been arrested for larceny and criminal possession of stolen property. Yacelga said he was never prosecuted; CBS reported that ICE data showed the charges were pending when he was detained.
The scale of actual third-country removals remains unclear. A monitoring group operated by Refugees International and Human Rights First estimated that about 17,500 people have been deported to third countries since President Trump returned to office, most of them to Mexico. CBS reported that more than 24,000 people received third-country removal orders after pretermission motions were filed, but ICE has not disclosed how many were actually removed and did not respond to CBS inquiries about that figure.
Attorneys interviewed by CBS questioned whether the agreements can absorb the number of people facing such orders. Honduras, for example, has agreed to accept 10 non-Honduran deportees per month, while more than 6,300 non-Hondurans had removal orders to Honduras by the end of March after receiving a pretermission motion, CBS reported.
The practice is also being challenged in federal court by plaintiffs who accuse the government of undermining due process and relying on countries with inadequate asylum systems. About 13,300 cases with third-country removal orders were on appeal, according to the CBS analysis, and appeals pause deportation while the Board of Immigration Appeals reviews them.
CBS said its analysis used Executive Office for Immigration Review data on asylum cases from Jan. 1, 2025, through March 31, 2026. The data does not specify whether every pretermission motion was tied to an asylum cooperative agreement, but CBS reported that interviews with attorneys and data from the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies indicate the vast majority filed in recent months were connected to third-country removal efforts.
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