US Deports 500+ to African Nations Where They Have No Ties, HRW Reports

The United States has deported more than 500 people to African countries where they have never lived and have no family, friends, or legal standing—people whom American immigration authorities themselves determined could not safely return to their own nations. Human Rights Watch documented this practice in a 125-page report released in October 2026, finding that the Trump administration systematically denied these individuals any meaningful opportunity to challenge their removal to these third countries, in violation of both domestic law and international treaty obligations.

The deportations involved six African nations: Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, and South Sudan. Researchers conducted interviews with 24 people who had been transferred between February and July 2026, piecing together accounts of what happened to them after they were put on planes from the United States. The pattern that emerged was consistent: people were shackled during flights lasting 18 hours or more, given little information about where they were being sent, and upon arrival found themselves in countries with no capacity or willingness to provide them asylum protection.

Among those deported were at least a dozen people who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Many had been granted asylum or other protection in the United States precisely because they faced persecution in their home countries based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. The Trump administration then sent them to African states where same-sex relations are criminalized. These individuals found themselves trapped: it was neither safe to return home nor possible to obtain protection in the country where they had been abandoned.

One Ethiopian man, 35 years old, had been imprisoned and tortured in his home country before fleeing to the United States. An immigration judge determined he could not be returned to Ethiopia because he would face torture there—a legal finding that should have protected him. Yet when he refused to sign a voluntary departure form to Chad, an ICE agent signed it without his consent. On the flight, he was chained at the legs, hands, and torso for hours, unable to stand or use the bathroom without remaining shackled. After arriving in Cameroon, representatives from the International Organization for Migration repeatedly asked him if he wanted to return home. "Every time I tell them, 'I'm not going. Stop asking me that. I don't want to die,'" he told Human Rights Watch in March 2026.

The conditions in the receiving countries varied, but the outcomes were often grim. Some people were arbitrarily detained upon arrival. Many were denied access to medications for serious medical conditions. Several African governments, having accepted these deportees under agreements with the United States, subsequently sent them onward to their home countries—the very places they had fled—in direct violation of the international principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits returning people to places where they face persecution or torture.

An unnamed U.S. official explained the policy's intent to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations with stark clarity: the purpose of sending people to countries like Eswatini or Palau was "to scare people." The official said the administration could "threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere." This was not an accidental consequence of bureaucratic dysfunction. It was the stated design. The threat of third-country removal has been weaponized as part of the broader mass deportation agenda, used to frighten migrants into leaving voluntarily before they could be caught in the machinery of detention and removal to unknown destinations.

Michael Garcia Bochenek, interim U.S. program director at Human Rights Watch, called on the African governments to terminate or suspend their agreements with the United States. "Because the US government uses these agreements to shirk its responsibilities and to deprive people of their due process rights, the African governments that have entered into these agreements should terminate or suspend them," he said. He also criticized the receiving countries themselves for their role in the abuse: "Several of these African governments are not only complicit in US abuses but have violated the human rights of these deported people themselves, including with arbitrary detention and in some cases sending them back to countries where they fled danger."

The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in December 2026 on whether the third-country removal policy violates the Due Process Clause of the Constitution or statutory prohibitions against removing people to the risk of torture. For now, the Court has allowed the government to continue the deportations. The question of whether this practice can survive constitutional scrutiny remains open, but the human consequences are already written in the accounts of people stranded in countries they never chose, facing dangers they fled, with no legal recourse and no way home.