The Trump administration has acknowledged a new error in a case challenging its attempts to send deportees to any country that will take them. Another immigrant who had earned protected status was rushed out of the country and put in danger—and U.S. officials have offered little more than a shrug.

This time, the immigrant is a gay man from Guatemala who fled death threats and twice tried to seek refuge in the United States. First, he was denied and deported home. He tried again last year and says that while traveling through Mexico, he was held for ransom and sexually assaulted.

The man, identified in court documents as O.C.G., won his case in February when a U.S. immigration judge granted him withholding of removal, shielding him from deportation to Guatemala because of the risk of harm he faced there. The Trump administration promptly sent him to Mexico instead. Threatened with prolonged detention, O.C.G. left Mexico and went back to Guatemala—the country the judge had said he shouldn’t be sent to—and is now in hiding there.

The Trump administration originally claimed that O.C.G. did not express fear of being sent to Mexico, which would have potentially stopped his deportation. But on Friday, the government acknowledged that its claim was based on an erroneous data entry, and that it has no record to support the assertion. Then, over the weekend, the government compounded its mistake by briefly disclosing the man’s full name in court documents, violating confidentiality rules. The Atlantic is not publishing his name, because his lawyers argued in court that identifying him could put his life in danger, especially while he is in hiding.

O.C.G. is one of several plaintiffs whose lawsuits have slowed the administration’s attempts to fast-track thousands of deportees to countries that aren’t their own. Sending people to third countries is allowed under U.S. immigration law, and the effort to enlist countries around the world is one of several unconventional strategies the administration is using as it rushes to increase deportations. The case of O.C.G. follows that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador in March because of what the government called an administrative error. Both men had been granted withholding of removal by U.S. immigration judges who had determined that they were more likely than not to be harmed if sent back to their countries of origin.

Read: An ‘administrative error’ sends a Maryland father to a Salvadoran prison

Thousands of immigrants are living in the United States with the same protected status, which allows them to work and have a Social Security number. Most are required to regularly check in at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, making them especially easy to find. Under President Joe Biden, such immigrants were generally left alone. Under President Donald Trump, they have become targets for ICE arrest and deportation.

The administration defended its use of third countries today: The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that they’re key to fulfilling Trump's promise to voters to deport massive numbers of immigrants. “If illegal aliens’ home countries cannot or will not accept their citizens back, that doesn’t mean they can stay here,” Jackson said.

Top administration officials have been pressuring world leaders to accept deportees who aren’t their own citizens, floating it as a way to ingratiate themselves to Trump. El Salvador, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico have obliged; attempts to enlist nations such as Libya and Ukraine have not yet succeeded.

The third-country strategy is designed as a work-around for cases like O.C.G.’s, in which courts have deemed people to be at significant risk of harm even if they don’t qualify for U.S. asylum.

The Trump officials overseeing the deportation campaign insist that they have two priorities for removals: the roughly 665,000 immigrants who have criminal records on ICE’s docket of nearly 8 million cases, and also some 1.5 million immigrants who have received deportation orders from a judge but are still in the country. (There is some overlap between those two groups.)

Before Trump took office, ICE officials estimated that only about half of those immigrants could actually be deported. Some would-be deportees had been granted a reprieve for a medical condition or other extenuating circumstance. But others—the government has not released statistics—were allowed to stay because they have a withholding-of-removal order or a similar protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a signatory, having pledged to not send migrants to places where they could face egregious abuse.

Soon after Trump took office, administration officials told ICE officers to take a fresh look at such cases as part of the broader push to ramp up deportations. Officers were instructed to arrest immigrants who have withholding status if they could potentially be sent to a third country, according to an ICE memo I obtained. “If removal appears significantly likely in the reasonably foreseeable future, the arrest may proceed without further investigation,” the memo instructed.

It’s unclear how many people with withholding status have been removed from the United States since then. Some U.S. allies receive third-country deportees, especially Mexico, which began accepting non-Mexicans on a large scale during the Biden administration. But those cases were generally limited to Central Americans and other Spanish-speakers. Guatemala has agreed to host some deportees, and Trump has sent others to Panama and Costa Rica, where some have been offered resettlement. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is the only one putting migrants in prison, charging the United States as much as $15 million.

Read: El Salvador’s exceptional prison state

Trump officials have made the effort a diplomatic priority. During a televised Cabinet meeting on April 30, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that the administration has engaged in discussions with other nations. “I say this unapologetically: We are actively searching for other countries to take people from third countries, not just El Salvador,” Rubio said, describing the push as an effort to expel gang members and criminals, even though the government acknowledges that many of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, do not have criminal records.

He added, “And the further away from America, the better, so they can’t come back across the border.”

U.S. District Court Judge Brian E. Murphy, who is overseeing the lawsuit involving O.C.G. and others, ruled in March that the administration cannot send deportees to a third country without providing written notice and due process. The First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Murphy’s decision on Friday. The decision is one of several that have thwarted the administration’s deportation plans. The Supreme Court on Friday effectively halted the administration’s attempt to use the Alien Enemies Act, which the Trump administration deployed in March to send Venezuelans to the Salvadoran megaprison.

Attorneys representing clients from Vietnam, Laos, and the Philippines rushed to court earlier this month, claiming that Trump officials were preparing to send their clients to Saudi Arabia or Libya. Murphy confirmed that such a move would be an illegal violation of his order.

Meanwhile, authorities in Libya “categorically denied” any deal with the United States to take deportees. The country has remained in conflict since the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. NBC News has reported that Trump officials are urging Libya to take in as many as 1 million displaced Palestinians from Gaza as part of the president’s plan to seize control of the enclave.

Although Murphy has stopped the Trump administration from sending immigrants to countries that are not their own without due process, those who were already sent, even mistakenly, have no clear path to return.

The ICE official Brian Ortega said in a sworn declaration filed late Friday that his previous claim that O.C.G. wasn’t afraid of deportation to Mexico was based on faulty data entry. “Upon further investigation,” Ortega told the court, “ICE was unable to identify an officer or officers who asked O.C.G. if he feared a return to Mexico.”

The mistaken deportation of O.C.G tacked on a new blunder over the weekend when attorneys for the Justice Department improperly published the man’s name. There was no indication that the disclosure was intentional, and the government resubmitted its court filing a day later with the name redacted, as required by law to protect the confidentiality of asylum seekers who could face harm or retaliation in their home country.

Attorneys for O.C.G. have filed motions to force the administration to bring him back to the United States. They said that the government has “greatly exacerbated the risk of harm to Plaintiff O.C.G. through their disclosure of his identity on the public docket, which has already garnered media attention and heightened the threat to his life and safety.”

O.C.G., whose age and other biographic details are redacted in court filings, had tried to show ICE officers in Arizona the immigration judge’s protective order as they prepared to deport him in February. The officers told him that the document had “expired” and put him on a deportation bus, according to his attorneys. When he asked to call his attorney, the officers told him it was too late.

In another wrongful-deportation case, a federal appeals court in Virginia yesterday upheld a ruling by a Trump-appointed judge that ordered the government to facilitate the return of a Venezuelan man sent to the CECOT prison in El Salvador on the same day as Abrego Garcia. The man, Daniel Lozano-Camargo, was deported in violation of a settlement involving asylum seekers who’d arrived in the United States as minors, the judge ruled.

But federal courts have had little success compelling the Trump administration to fix its deportation errors. It’s been more than a month since the Supreme Court told the White House to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from prison in El Salvador. He’s still there, and the Trump administration has not said publicly what, if anything, it’s doing to bring him back.