How Trump turned a refugee bureau into a $410 million deportation operation

Inside the secret deals powering the president’s push to deport migrants to countries not their own. (Illustration by Klawe Rzeczy for The Washington Post; AFP/Anadolu/Getty; iStock)pol-forbidden deportations - deep vertical for MOBILE FINAL (Illustration by Klawe Rzeczy for The Washington Post; AFP/Anadolu/Getty; iStock)September 21, 2026 at 1:00 a.m. EDTJust nowThe U.S. diplomat arrived in West Africa in mid-June with little fanfare, hopscotching along the Atlantic coastline for scheduled visits with senior government officials in the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Togo and Gabon, whose president greeted him inside an opulent seaside palace.The American, a career State Department official named Christian Ehrhardt, was an unlikely diplomatic VIP. For nearly two decades, he served as an officer in the agency’s security branch, focusing on embassy protection, before being summoned to Washington last year to lead a new initiative — the Office of Remigration.Since then, Ehrhardt, 41, has crisscrossed Africa, trying to persuade the continent’s leaders to accept flights full of people deported from the United States even though the migrants are not their own citizens. These “third ...