No cooperation, no visas: This is how Trump can force any country to accept the migrants he deports

In less than a month, Donald Trump’s proposal to carry out the largest deportation in history has gone from campaign slogan to imminent reality. And it is clear that the president-elect intends to fulfill his promise by any means necessary. He has already resorted to tariff threats against Mexico and Canada to force them to stop illegal immigration into the United States, and the intimidation will not stop there. Because in order to expel 11 million people, Trump will have to pressure a long list of countries to take back their citizens, or even people of other nationalities who cannot return to their own countries. To do this, he has promised that he will resort to coercion; the question is how. One possible way will be to withhold all types of visas for countries that refuse to cooperate.

Since November 5, the president-elect and members of his future administration have been detailing the measures they will implement to carry out mass deportations. They have assured, for example, that Trump will declare a national emergency, that he will use the military, that he will build detention camps on the border, and that he will carry out massive raids in workplaces. However, they have left an important question unresolved: how they plan to twist the arms of countries around the world to accept deported people.

“We can’t just put them on a plane,” Tom Homan, the Republican’s future “border czar,” who will be in charge of deportations, recently acknowledged in an interview. “There’s a process we have to go through. You have to contact the country, they have to agree to accept them, then they got to send you travel documents,” he added, assuring that it would be a long process. To begin with, there are several countries that do not allow deportations from the United States, including Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Other countries that the U.S. government describes as “recalcitrant” because they refuse or do not cooperate in deportation processes include China, Russia and India, according to the latest update from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE). And another 17 nations cooperate sometimes or only slightly.

Beyond tariffs — a tool he used for diplomatic purposes during his first presidency and is now using again — the president-elect has another instrument at his disposal that he could use to try to force any of those countries to accept deported immigrants: visas. His administration can condition the granting of visas to certain countries on their acceptance of receiving people deported by the United States. This is established by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and is reflected in Project 2025, the conservative agenda from which Trump tried to distance himself during the campaign.

However, among Trump’s appointments for his second administration there are several individuals who participated in the development of Project 2025, which promotes ultraconservative policies to transform the federal government in order to, among other things, radically change the country’s immigration system. The document — which not only echoes the Republican’s immigration policies, but details the mechanisms for carrying them out — was drafted by Homan and the White House’s future deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, who will be in charge of overseeing the policies of the new administration, especially with regard to immigration.

In the far-right guide that the president-elect could use as a roadmap for his administration, whether he is willing to admit it or not, the authors recommend invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act within the context of mass deportations to crush any resistance from affected countries. To that end, the text alludes to Section 243(d) of the INA, which states that when “a government of a foreign country denies or unreasonably delays accepting an individual who is a citizen, subject, national, or resident of that country, the Secretary of State shall order consular officers in that foreign country to discontinue granting immigrant visas or non-immigrant visas, or both, to citizens, subjects, nationals, and residents of that country until the Secretary of Homeland Security notifies the Secretary of State that the country has accepted the individual.”

This is a sanction that would remain in effect until the affected country accepts the return of all of its nationals awaiting deportation and “formally commits to future, regular acceptance of its nationals,” explains Project 2025. “Blackletter implementation of this law will demonstrate a heretofore lacking seriousness to the international community that other nations must respect U.S. immigration laws and work with federal authorities to accept returning nationals — or lose access to the United States,” the authors conclude.

If the law were to be implemented, the consequences would be severe. It could upend the country’s entire visa system, which includes more than 60 different types of immigrant and nonimmigrant visas. Immigrant visas include the IRI or CR1 for spouses of U.S. citizens. Nonimmigrant visas include the H-2A and H-2B for temporary workers, the F and M for international students, and the B1 for tourist travel.

In fiscal year 2024, which ended last October, the United States issued a record 11.5 million visas. The figure is part of an upward trend that was already evident last year, when 11 million visas were approved, the vast majority of them — 10,438,327 — nonimmigrant, according to State Department figures. The 2023 total represented a 50% increase over the previous year.

Based on last year’s figures, the five countries whose citizens received the most nonimmigrant visas were Mexico, India, Brazil, Colombia and China. Two of them — India and China — do not accept deportations from the United States.

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