Thousands of asylum-seekers abandon their cases as ICE seeks to deport them to nations they aren't from

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May 8, 2026 / 12:13 PM EDT

/ CBS News

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Willian Yacelga Benalcazar's asylum case followed what had become a similar pattern in immigration courts across the country: After telling a judge he feared returning to his home country, the judge ordered his deportation to another one. Yacelga, who said he fled threats from criminal gangs in Ecuador, was facing removal to Honduras. By March, he had spent five months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, where he said he caught a virus, had to fight for food and drank water contaminated with chlorine. So he asked to be sent back to his native Ecuador rather than continue to fight his case in the U.S."I believe we abandoned the asylum case because the lawyer told me I could be in detention for three, four additional months. I was already sick in there. I couldn't take it anymore," Yacelga told CBS News from Ecuador, speaking in Spanish during a phone interview."All I wanted was to get out, to be free, because it's horrible being locked up in there," he added.A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told CBS News Benalcazar entered the U.S. illegally and was deported to Ecuador on April 16. The Trump administration's unprecedented efforts to deport asylum-seekers to third countries have stalled thousands of immigrants' cases and scared thousands more into giving up their asylum claims, according to a CBS News analysis of recently released federal data and interviews with attorneys and immigration policy experts. Third-country deportations "have more to do with fear than scale," said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.