Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines the United States’ use of third-country deportation and its influence on the reconfiguration of racialised deportation circuits, as well as on practices of containment and deterrence across the Americas. We introduce the concept of ‘liminal deportations’ to problematise the formation of transitory – territorial, experiential, and legal – spaces. We argue that liminal deportations reveal new geopolitical dynamics within contemporary punitive regimes of deportation and detention. These dynamics are characterised by the convergence and multiplication of intermediary actors, ontologies of resistance adapted to transitoriness, and emerging post-deportation scenarios that articulate ad hoc forms of deportability and legal precarity. The analysis focuses on the implementation of liminal deportations of migrants from Asia and Africa in Costa Rica and Panama, drawing on documentary research, interviews, and field observations conducted in September 2025. By attending to the specificities of the ‘intermediary countries’ analysed here, we foreground the geopolitical role of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) through its Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programmes. Ultimately, given the interconnections between the United States and multiple forced destinations across the Global South, we conclude that third-country deportation constitutes a substantial transformation in deportation governance, as well as in its political, racial, spatial, and temporal scope.
Authors: Carina Trabalón, Amalia Campos-Delgado
Institutions: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Leiden University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7161013031