Caitlin Dickerson

But some people after that first hearing stipulate to their removal.

And I was concerned that it seemed some people...

didn't really know what they were agreeing to because the proceedings were moving so fast.

So the Trump administration is also using its diplomatic might to get other countries on board with its mass deportation effort.

I mean, it's sort of amazing.

Anybody from a city mayor to a business owner to a leader of a foreign country, if they come to President Trump right now, the message seems to be, bring me something on immigration if you want to work together.

And so through diplomatic efforts and through pressure campaigns, the Trump administration has convinced people

several dozen countries to accept deportees who are from other parts of the world.

In theory, this is to address the problem that some countries don't accept deportees from the United States.

That's their way of pushing back against the United States and American foreign policy is to say, we're not going to accept people who you want to deport to us.

In reality, that was always a small number of people.

I think this third country removal program is really a scare tactic more than anything else.

I mean, even though we have relationships with, I think, more than 40 countries that have been established, and I think the administration is in negotiations with more than 60 currently, and there are more coming online regularly.

You only have a few hundred people who actually have been removed to a third country.

But we've been talking about this fear campaign that's designed to convince immigrants living in the United States to leave and discourage anybody thinking about coming here from doing so.

What is scarier than knowing that you may not only be deported, you may be deported to a poor country where you don't speak the language and you don't have any relationships or anyone to protect you and keep you safe?

So I really think that the third country removals, which are are legally dubious, they've been challenged, but they have been carried out so far, are more about the fear campaign.

They're not really logistically feasible on a large scale.

They don't really make sense as a foreign policy initiative, but they're very intimidating.

That's a longstanding strategy on the right that kind of the most prominent anti-immigrant or restrictionist, even elected officials, but also activist groups have pushed for a really long time.