United States and Ecuador secretly signed Asylum Cooperative Agreement

The United States and Ecuador secretly signed an Asylum Cooperative Agreement in July 2025, formalized through diplomatic notes dated July 16 and 23, 2025 and published by DHS in the Federal Register on November 17, 2025. Under the agreement, the U.S. retains discretion to propose transferring asylum seekers to Ecuador to pursue their claims there, Ecuador retains discretion to accept or deny each transfer, and unaccompanied children are excluded — but the Federal Register notice includes no evaluation of whether Ecuador can actually provide a full and fair asylum procedure, the legal standard such agreements are supposed to satisfy.

Only a small number of Cuban and Venezuelan nationals had actually been transferred to Ecuador as of this filing, beginning in mid-January 2026. Government attorneys have nonetheless invoked the agreement's mere existence far more broadly, moving to pretermit — summarily dismiss without a hearing — more than 18,000 pending asylum cases by designating Ecuador as the removal destination, a use of the agreement that dramatically outpaces its actual implementation.

Updates

2026-06-17 — BIA ruled immigration judges cannot require proof Ecuador offers fair procedures [4]

The Board of Immigration Appeals held in Matter of C-I-G-M- & L-V-S-G- that an oral motion to pretermit an asylum case under the Ecuador agreement provides sufficient notice of DHS's intent to remove someone there, and that immigration judges lack authority to require DHS to produce an implementation plan, proof Ecuador is willing to accept the specific individual, or any assessment of whether Ecuador actually offers full and fair asylum procedures — foreclosing exactly the inquiry the agreement's legal standard is supposed to require.