President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda has revealed a crucial but little recognized truth. Deportation is not unilateral. It requires an agreement between two countries — one that’s expelling people, and one that’s receiving them.

President Trump made mass deportations a signature campaign issue. In the days since he was sworn in, ICE agents have conducted high-profile raids and sent military and charter planes carrying undocumented immigrants back to their countries of origin.

That has led to diplomatic friction: A flight of shackled deportees to Brazil drew protests from its government, and President Gustavo Petro of Colombia refused to allow two U.S. military planes carrying deportees to land, sparking a diplomatic face-off that led to the threat of U.S. tariffs before Colombia eventually backed down.

The disputes showed that it’s one thing for the Trump administration to detain undocumented immigrants, and quite another to actually deport them. Sending people to another country requires bilateral negotiations — and, in the last week, quite a bit of diplomatic strong arming.

The Trump administration also seems to be working to strengthen its diplomatic leverage. On Wednesday, the president announced plans to set up a detention camp at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” President Trump said. “Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo.”

Deportation is a negotiation

Under international law, countries are obligated to receive their own citizens who are deported by another country. But in practice, there are often ways to push back. Countries can block deportation flights from landing, decline to issue travel documents to their citizens and refuse to acknowledge that the deportees are their citizens.

“The legal situation is very clear,” said Gerald Knaus, the chairman of the European Stability Initiative, who helped to broker a high-profile deportation agreement between the European Union and Turkey in 2016. “But the legal situation doesn’t help if the countries to which you want to take the people don’t recognize that they are their citizens.”

In the past, very few countries have refused to accept deportees from the United States entirely, said Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. But some, often referred to as “recalcitrant” countries, have placed restrictions on how many deportation flights they will accept, and of whom. As of 2020, the United States had designated 13 countries as “recalcitrant,” including China, India and Cuba.

“China will take deportation flights occasionally, but it doesn’t take nearly as many as the U.S. government would like it to, and certainly not nearly as many as would be enough to deport the number of unauthorized Chinese nationals in the U.S.,” Lind said. And while Cuba began taking some deportation flights in 2017, following substantial negotiations by the Obama administration, it still limits the number of deportees it will accept.

Carrots and sticks

When the U.S. wants to deport people, it has four main options: “good cop” negotiations that offer diplomatic incentives to countries to accept their deported citizens; “bad cop” negotiations that do the same via threats and coercion; finding a third country willing to accept the deportees; or just allowing the migrants to remain in the United States indefinitely.

Perversely, countries hostile to the United States may be in a stronger position to extract good-cop incentives, while friendlier allies will be more sensitive to bad-cop threats, such as tariffs.

Venezuela, for example, stopped accepting deportations last year after the U.S. reimposed sanctions, but President Nicolás Maduro has signaled that he would consider changing his policy in exchange for economic incentives from the United States. By contrast, countries like Colombia, with strong trade ties to the United States, have more to lose from new tariffs and other coercive measures.

Third-country agreements, in which countries agree to accept deportees who aren’t their own citizens, are relatively rare, but they do exist.

For years, Australia paid the governments of Papua New Guinea and Nauru to host detention centers for asylum seekers who attempted to reach Australia by boat. The program was eventually halted after numerous legal challenges.

In 2016, the European Union gave Turkey cash and other incentives in exchange for accepting Syrian asylum seekers and other undocumented migrants deported from the European Union, as part of an effort to stem a migration crisis in which more than a million people entered Europe by land and sea, many of them from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

One big question for the Trump administration is whether it can convince Mexico to accept deportees from other countries. President Claudia Sheinbaum previously vowed not to do so. But in a news conference this week, she said Mexico had received 4,000 deportees and that a “large majority” — but not all — were Mexican.

President Trump has already threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexico if it does not do more to stop migrants from reaching the U.S. border and stop fentanyl smuggling. Deportations may become part of those broader negotiations.

The Guantánamo option

President Trump, by opening a migrant camp in Guantánamo, could effectively create a third-country option without having to negotiate with another government. Uncooperative countries like Colombia could be forced to choose between accepting deportation flights from the United States or having their citizens held indefinitely in a detention camp.

My colleague Carole Rosenberg has covered the Pentagon’s offshore prison facility on Guantánamo for decades, since the first detainees were brought there from Afghanistan in January 2002.

She and our colleague Hamed Aleaziz reported this week that several U.S. presidential administrations have prepared a site in Guantánamo to potentially accommodate tens of thousands of migrants in a sprawling tent city. The proposed site could be surrounded with barbed wire, like the military did for the tent camps of the 1990s, which were erected to house both families and single men when some 45,000 people fled there from Cuba and Haiti.

Some experts questioned the legality of housing migrants on the base. “Guantánamo is a black hole designed to escape scrutiny and with a dark history of inhumane conditions. It is a transparent attempt to avoid legal oversight that will fail,” Lucas Guttentag, a Justice Department official in the Biden administration, told them.

And even if the detention plan survives legal challenges, the utility of a Guantánamo facility would only go so far. A 30,000-person detention facility is enormous, compared with the 40,000 immigrants currently being held in private detention centers and local jails within the United States. But Guantánamo would hold only a tiny fraction of the millions of migrants that President Trump has pledged to deport, and would be costly to operate indefinitely.

The Cuban government, which has long held that the U.S. base is illegal, said in a statement that holding tens of thousands of people there “would generate a scenario of risk and insecurity.”

Additional reporting by Ed Augustin in Havana.

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