On a fall evening in 2022, state security agents in her home country in Africa broke through Rumbidzai’s front door. At gunpoint, she said, they threatened her and beat and kidnapped her companion, a close friend and fellow activist in an opposition party targeted by the government.

Three and a half years later, his whereabouts are still unknown. Rumbidzai — a nickname to protect her identity — fled the African country shortly after that terror-filled night, boarding a plane to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City.

“When I arrived,” Rumbidzai said, “they asked me what I was there for. I told them I was running away from persecution. I feared for my safety.”

Today, Rumbidzai lives and works in New Jersey, where she awaits her turn to argue her asylum case before an immigration court. But she may not get the chance.

In January, just days before a scheduled hearing, the Department of Homeland Security submitted a motion asking a judge to dismiss Rumbidzai's asylum application. A hearing was not needed, according to DHS, because it would send her to a third country where she could seek protection.

She had prepared to show the court that her life was in danger in her native country, where abduction and torture of opposition activists is an ongoing human rights concern.

Now, she fears that the country where the United States might send her — Uganda — would not be safe for her either. She asked that her native country not be named, for fear it would reveal her identity.

Over the past year, the Trump administration has dramatically expanded the use of third country deportations — in which it deports migrants to countries that are not their own — as it works to overhaul and restrict access to an overwhelmed asylum system.

U.S. officials say they are sending asylum seekers to “safe third countries” to seek asylum, even as their safety is called into question.

DHS attorneys filed nearly 5,000 motions to dismiss asylum cases and send applicants to other nations in December 2025, according to an analysis by bklg.org, an online service for immigration lawyers. The analysts described it as a “staggering increase from the few hundred such motions filed each month" in the summer of 2025.