Yasmany Moreno de Armas, a 32-year-old Cuban who had lived in Miami for a decade under a policy allowing Cubans who reached U.S. soil to pursue residency, was detained by federal immigration authorities last May while seeking asylum.

While held in a Louisiana detention facility, he was placed on a plane he believed was another transfer between detention centers. Two hours into the flight, he says, he learned he was being deported to a country in Africa.

He is now in the Central African Republic, a nation the State Department warns Americans not to visit.

According to ABC News, he is among roughly 25,000 people deported to so-called third countries during the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, a figure it attributes to the immigrant rights organization Human Rights First.

Third-country deportations — removing migrants to a country where they hold no citizenship or personal ties — are legal under the Immigration and Nationality Act but have historically been rare, according to immigration lawyers cited by ABC News.

What has changed is scale: the administration has built formal deals with nearly three dozen countries, including Liberia, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic, to remove asylum seekers, refugees and migrants with criminal records with little or no warning.

Immigration attorney Meredyth Yoon told ABC News that people are being sent 'without prior notice, without due process, without any opportunity to object,' in a process she called opaque and lacking transparency.

The contradiction at the center of the story is stark: the State Department's own travel advisory warns U.S. citizens against traveling to the Central African Republic because of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health issues and terrorism, yet the Department of Homeland Security says the men 'were deported to a safe country' and that it is 'applying the law as written,' according to ABC News.

The deported men say they arrived without passports or identification documents, leaving them without legal status. 'We don't have a visa here or any papers, we are illegal,' Aristides Fernandez Garcia told ABC News, adding that he feels unable to leave even if he could afford to.

'I feel kidnapped,' he said. The International Organization for Migration says it is providing food, health care and counseling to those who remain.

Human Rights First policy director Savi Arvey told ABC News the U.S. has spent nearly $50 million on third-country deportation deals, and argued that sending refugees to countries run by corrupt autocrats shows 'a complete disregard for due process, for international law and for human dignity.'

The enforcement climate remains intense at home: The Guardian reports ICE's monthly arrests and detentions increased in June and July according to the Deportation Data Project, and that the agency recently signed $51 million in leases for two San Antonio office spaces ahead of opening a detention center that can house 1,500 people per day, per the San Antonio Express-News.

With deportees stranded without documents and legal advocates promising scrutiny, third-country removals look set to remain a defining fight of the administration's immigration agenda.