A little-known State Department division of about 15 employees has negotiated third-country deportation deals with 31 countries and committed at least $410 million, quietly powering the administration's immigration crackdown.
A small State Department office with a staff of about 15 has quietly built one of the most consequential immigration operations in modern American history, turning the machinery of U.S. diplomacy toward a single goal: removing illegal aliens from the country and making sure other nations take them.
The Office of Remigration, a division inside the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, has negotiated deportation agreements with 31 countries and committed at least $410 million to carry them out as of the end of June, internal government records show. Its work has reshaped how Washington approaches a problem that has frustrated administrations of both parties for decades.
At the center of it is Christian Ehrhardt, a 41-year-old career official who spent nearly two decades in the department's security branch protecting American embassies before he was summoned to Washington last year to run the new office.
Ehrhardt has spent the year crisscrossing Africa, meeting heads of state and senior ministers to persuade them to accept deportation flights carrying people who are not their own citizens. In mid-June he traveled along the Atlantic coast, stopping in Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Togo and Gabon, where the president received him inside a seaside palace.
Foreign governments treat him as far more than a mid-level diplomat. "The messaging is not just that he is a deputy assistant secretary of state. He's really part of the White House, so they roll out the red carpet," a U.S. official familiar with the meetings said.
The result is a third-country removal network that stretches across Africa and Latin America, assembled at a fraction of the cost of the sprawling federal programs it replaced. Supporters point to the pace as the clearest evidence that the model works: a compact office with a clear mandate is moving faster than entire agencies that answer to layers of review.
The commitments include $81 million in direct payments to 13 foreign governments, along with $179 million pledged to the International Organization for Migration and $124 million to the U.N. Refugee Agency for projects tied to the agreements. The direct payments often represent a dramatic increase over what those governments previously received from Washington.
Each deal carries its own terms. Uganda will accept only African nationals, while the Democratic Republic of the Congo has set the opposite rule and will not take anyone from Africa. The Central African Republic and Eswatini have agreed to accept violent criminals, while Ghana and Sierra Leone will take only nonviolent offenders.
Early flights show the reach of the program. Planes have carried migrants from China, Russia, Iran and Afghanistan to Costa Rica, and a flight to the tiny African kingdom of Eswatini delivered people from Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and Jamaica. The expansion builds on the earlier wave of removals that sent more than 100 illegal aliens to eight African nations, a template the administration has since scaled up.
Officials credit the strategy to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who has driven the administration's immigration agenda and pushed key State Department appointments that keep removals at the front of U.S. foreign policy.
The Office of Remigration sits at the heart of a deliberate shift in American policy. Days after taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending refugee processing for everyone except white South Africans, effectively shutting down a program that had admitted more than 100,000 refugees in 2024 under the previous administration.
The State Department then severed long-standing contracts with U.S.-based resettlement groups and redirected $250 million from refugee aid programs to help finance Project Homecoming, a Department of Homeland Security initiative that gives illegal aliens an incentive to leave the country voluntarily.
A system once built around resettling people from abroad has become one focused on moving them out, and doing it far faster. The office's structure -- tiny, centralized and reporting up through the White House -- is precisely what allows it to cut through delays that would normally stretch for years.
Negotiations remain open with several of the countries Ehrhardt visited in June, and more agreements are expected in the coming months. That means more destinations, more charter flights and more money moving through a small suite of offices in Foggy Bottom.
The next phase will test whether the network can keep expanding at the same pace. Every new deal adds a government that must be paid, an aircraft that must be scheduled and a receiving country that must be ready -- logistics that a 15-person team has so far managed without missing a step.
For an administration that made border enforcement its signature issue, the Office of Remigration has become one of its most effective instruments. It is also a lesson in scale: a small team with a clear mandate can accomplish what an entire bureaucracy could not.
A little-known State Department division of about 15 employees has negotiated third-country deportation deals with 31 countries and committed at least $410 million, quietly powering the administration's immigration crackdown.
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