(MEXICO) — Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday that the United States deported nearly 13,000 Blocks Third-Country Removal Policy After Secret Deportations of 6,000 Cubans”>third-country nationals to Mexico between January 20, 2025 and March 9, 2026, including about 6,000 Cuban nationals in the last year, and sent many into dangerous conditions without due process protections.

The group said U.S. authorities carried out the removals without individualized screening, even when people expressed fear of torture or serious harm. Many arrived in Mexico without documentation, money, or personal belongings.

Human Rights Watch released the report on May 27, 2026. It said removals were still ongoing when it was written.

Among the nationalities affected were Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Mexico functioned as the final destination for many of them, the group said.

Researchers interviewed 53 third-country nationals deported from the United States to Tapachula, Chiapas, and Villahermosa, Tabasco. Their accounts formed the basis of the organization’s findings on how the transfers were carried out and what happened after arrival.

The group said no one it interviewed was given a meaningful chance to object to removal to Mexico. It said that raised due process concerns under U.S. immigration law.

A Department of Justice habeas filing from March 2026 referred to a “standing (unwritten) agreement” with Mexico, according to Human Rights Watch. The same filing said Immigration and Customs Enforcement had removed “approximately 6,000 Cuban nationals to Mexico in the last year.”

That figure tracked one of the report’s central findings: the scale of removals involving Cuban nationals. Human Rights Watch said Cubans made up a large share of those sent to Mexico during the period it examined.

The broader count covered nearly 13,000 third-country nationals removed to Mexico over a little more than a year. Human Rights Watch said the transfers ran from the day President Trump took office on January 20, 2025 through March 9, 2026.

The organization said deported migrants often arrived with almost nothing. Some had no identity documents, no cash, and none of the belongings they had before removal.

Human Rights Watch said that mattered because people sent to unfamiliar cities in southern Mexico could not easily prove who they were, travel onward, or secure basic needs. The report described Tapachula and Villahermosa as receiving points for people the United States had expelled even though they were not Mexican nationals.

Its findings focused on what the group described as a system of removals to Mexico without individualized screening. In the report’s account, that meant U.S. authorities did not assess each person separately before deportation to determine whether removal to Mexico exposed them to torture, serious harm, or other danger.

The report linked that practice to a lack of procedural safeguards. It said those interviewed had no meaningful opportunity to challenge their transfer to Mexico before they were removed.

Human Rights Watch presented the policy as one affecting several national groups, not a single population. Cubans appeared prominently in the data, but Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans also appeared among those deported.

The group’s account placed Mexico at the end of the removal process for many of those individuals rather than as a transit point. People expelled there often remained in Mexico after the United States carried out the deportation, it said.

Wednesday’s report added a fresh public accounting of a practice that Human Rights Watch said had continued while it was still collecting information. That timing meant the organization was describing an active removal system, not a closed period of enforcement.

The due process concerns in the report turned on a narrow but consequential question: whether people can contest removal to a country that is not their own before the government sends them there. Human Rights Watch said the answer, in the cases it examined, was no.

It said that absence of a hearing or other meaningful chance to object was especially serious for migrants who had already told U.S. authorities they feared torture or serious harm. Yet the organization said the United States deported nearly 13,000 third-country nationals to Mexico, without individualized screening, during the period it reviewed.

Human Rights Watch based that conclusion on interviews, deportation patterns, and the government’s own court filing from March 2026. In that filing, the Department of Justice described a “standing (unwritten) agreement” with Mexico, language that pointed to an established arrangement rather than isolated transfers.

The report did not frame the issue as limited to border management alone. It described the consequences in practical terms: people taken out of the United States, deposited in Mexican cities, and left to fend for themselves without papers, money, or belongings.

Those details gave the report its sharpest charge against the policy. Human Rights Watch said the United States had deported thousands of people to danger in Mexico while denying them an individualized review of the risks they said they faced.