The Court Said No. The Plane Flew Anyway.

An appeals court struck down the deportation program, and two private jets kept flying over the Atlantic.

"The point is to scare people. With countries like Palau or Eswatini, the point is that the Administration can threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere."

— A Trump administration official, quoted in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report

At 11:36 p.m. on Wednesday, September 23, the First Circuit issued a short order with one operative sentence. "Consistent with the court's September 18, 2026 judgment, the March 16, 2026 stay pending appeal is dissolved." That was the last legal stay propping up the Trump administration's third-country deportation program, a program the same court had already struck down five days earlier. One ICE-connected private jet was already over the Atlantic when the order came down. Another took off from a Louisiana airport shortly after midnight. By Thursday morning, the first jet had landed in Ghana, then flew to Liberia, then to Dakar. No one has said who was on board, or whether anyone was actually dropped off. But the flight data is not ambiguous. The court said no. The plane flew anyway.

Third-country removal has become the signature immigration project of the second Trump administration, the machine that has deported more than 25,000 people to countries where they have no family, no standing, and often no right to be there at all. The government has signed removal agreements with at least 35 countries, from Palau to Eswatini, and many of the destination countries are on the State Department's own "Level 4: Do Not Travel" list, the agency's highest warning level for life-threatening risk. The logic of the deals, insofar as they are known, is transactional: the destination countries accept the people, and Washington sends aid, or other forms of financial compensation, in exchange. And there is one detail that should alarm anyone who has ever read an immigration statute: the very fact that the United States is sending these people to a third country instead of returning them home means each of them has at least a viable asylum claim. The program's endpoint is not a correction of a mistake. It is a product.

The program was built in the dark, and the darkness is the point. Some of the underlying agreements have never been made public, and the publication Lawfare is suing the State Department under the Case-Zablocki Act, a little-known transparency law that requires the executive branch to disclose its international agreements to Congress. The details of the flights are not public either. The destinations are not public either. In the same class action, last year, the Department of Homeland Security tried to fly class members to Libya and South Sudan in apparent violation of a temporary restraining order that a federal judge had granted just weeks earlier. At a hastily arranged hearing, a judge asked a Justice Department lawyer where the plane was. "I'm told that that information is classified, and I am told that the final destination is also classified," the lawyer responded. When asked under what authority the government had classified the plane's location, the lawyer had no answer.

The most recent version of this trick didn't even need a hearing. On Thursday, when American Prospect reporters asked the Department of Homeland Security what was on the jets that had just taken off and where they were going, the department's spokesperson Micah Bock had this to say, according to the newspaper: "If you can't provide us with the information necessary to verify your claim, you're wasting our time. It's ironic, because here at DHS we can't think of a bigger waste of time than writing for the American Prospect." The follow-up, reportedly, was more specific: "Please provide the A-number or date of birth."

Translation: the government can't tell you where its own planes are going, and it will tell you that you are the problem.

The flight data tells its own story. According to tracking data cited by the American Prospect, a Gulfstream V connected to a charter company called Talon Air was already over the Atlantic when the First Circuit's order came down. It landed in Ghana at 7:53 a.m. local time, then went to Liberia, then to Dakar. Two of the stops were in countries that hold third-country removal agreements with the United States. A second Gulfstream, connected to Journey Aviation, took off from Alexandria, Louisiana, at 12:32 a.m. on Thursday, landed at Guantanamo Bay, then headed to San Juan, then east across the Atlantic.

The planes are not government aircraft. They are private jets chartered for the operation, tied to billionaires connected to the administration. The Journey Aviation aircraft is connected to Michael and Gil Dezer. The Talon Air aircraft is connected to Joe Nakash, the founder of the clothing company Jordache, and Eli Gindi. This is the normal operating rhythm of the second Trump administration: private jets, private contracts, private profits, public secrecy. The government did not build the deportation machine. It chartered one.

And Guantanamo has become the staging ground. In late August, ICE put 12 Somali men on a plane, told them they were being sent to Somalia, and instead landed at Guantanamo Bay and held them there. Some had no criminal record, and several were asylum seekers. One detainee, Sakariye Abdi Mohamed, described the base as "the worst place ever I've been in my life." Another said the flight felt "just like a kidnapping." Last week, ICE also began digitally erasing detainees from its own online detainee locator tool, so that the people the government was sending to the middle of nowhere simply stopped appearing in the government's own records.

The reason this all works, as the official quoted in the Senate report put it, is not that the planes are fast. It is that the fear is real. When a person in a detention center learns that the United States is shipping strangers to Level 4 countries for a fee, that knowledge does not stay in the detention center. It travels. The destination does not have to be credible. It only has to be imaginable.

Translation: the plane is the message.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been more explicit than his colleagues are. At a cabinet meeting last year, he said, "We are working with other countries to say, 'We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries.'" What he did not say, what the officials who receive the cargo also do not say, is that the people being shipped have human rights, and that the countries being paid to take them have extensive records of violating them.

The fight is now going to the Supreme Court. The administration has applied for a stay so it can keep sending people to third countries while the appeal is pending, and the opposition, filed on September 28, points out that the lower court has already done the work the government is asking the justices to redo: the program was struck down, and then it kept running. Docket number 26A406 is now the most consequential case on the immigration calendar, and the answer it produces will define whether a federal court order has any force at all when a private jet is on the tarmac.

Until then, the mechanics continue. The planes are still flying. The agreements are still secret. The locators are still erasing. The people on board are still, by the government's own legal logic, people with viable asylum claims. The court said no. The plane flew anyway. The only question left is whether the next court will say no loudly enough to be heard over the engines.