US deports migrants to Central African Republic under controversial agreement

Brayan Omar Sánchez stands on a balcony in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, watching a woman carry a basket on her head, observing the brick-walled houses and unpaved red streets below. Everything feels impossible. A month earlier, on May 13, he had left his apartment in Miami's Allapattah neighborhood for what he thought would be an ordinary day. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained him. For the past decade, he had worked as a gardener, truck driver, and small business owner—always undocumented, always working. Now, handcuffed and shackled on July 31, he was put on a plane headed for Africa, a place he knew almost nothing about except that it seemed impossibly far away.

When Sánchez asked a guard why there was no water for bathing, the response was blunt: "This is Africa, deal with it." He had been transferred through detention centers in Miami, Denver, Phoenix, and finally to Prairieland in Texas, where he was placed in a unit with African migrants—a separation that struck him as deliberate. On July 26, someone first mentioned Africa as a possibility. Sánchez thought it was a mistake, a system error. He had never signed a deportation order. When he asked where they were being sent, an officer simply said, "To Africa." The next morning, terrified and unable to sleep, he showered fifteen times trying to calm himself. That afternoon, an officer arrived with a warning: they were leaving the next day, and if anyone refused to board, they would be beaten. When a Vietnamese migrant resisted the following morning, armed officers with riot shields arrived. The man was beaten so severely he lost consciousness. Sánchez and the others were handcuffed, loaded onto buses without food or water, and driven to the airport.

The flight took twenty-two hours, with stops in Senegal and Nigeria to drop off other deportees. Shackled at the feet, hands, and waist, passengers could not scratch their faces or use the bathroom. They received only a bottle of water and some bread. When the plane landed in Bangui on the night of August 1, it carried approximately eighty migrants from Turkey, Romania, Afghanistan, Ecuador, Cuba, and several African nations. Among them was Arístides Fernández García, a thirty-seven-year-old Cuban who had been living in the United States with an I-220A, a legal status that had protected more than five hundred thousand Cubans. He had owned a trucking company, paid taxes, never received a traffic ticket. When he crossed the border in Arizona in 2022, an officer told him, "Welcome to the United States; you've just arrived in a safe country." Today, that phrase seemed like mockery. Yasmani Noel Moreno de Armas, thirty-one, had been detained without explanation while relaxing in West Palm Beach on May 11, 2025. He did not realize he was headed to Africa until the plane had been airborne for more than two hours.

This was the second deportation flight to the Central African Republic in less than two months, following a bilateral agreement signed between the U.S. and CAR governments worth eighty-one million dollars. The first flight had departed from Alexandria International Airport in Louisiana on June 12, carrying more than twenty migrants, though the exact number remains unclear. The U.S. State Department itself has issued a travel alert warning American citizens against visiting the Central African Republic, citing unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health risks, and terrorism. Yet this is now where the United States is sending deported migrants with no legal status, no identification documents, no visas, and no apparent support system. The Central African Republic joins a growing list of African nations—including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Eswatini, and Equatorial Guinea—that have agreed to accept deportees from the United States in exchange for substantial payments.

At Maison Confort, an apartment complex in the Lakouanga neighborhood, the deportees share cramped quarters with mosquito nets, unreliable electricity, and a kitchen they have been told not to use. They were each given two shirts, a pair of pants, and flip-flops. They are forbidden from leaving the hotel. When they have ventured out, it has been by paying guards to take them to a corner store or barbershop using money their families have begun sending. De Armas needed a haircut but could not communicate with the barber; he had to show a picture. Both he and García were taken to a hospital where they could not explain their symptoms to doctors. They suffer from stomach problems caused by unfamiliar food and allergies from the changing climate. De Armas looked at the hospital and thought of Cuba: "It's worse than Cuba." The days have brought a crushing sense of helplessness. They do not know how long they will be confined. They have no identification cards, no legal status, no pathway forward. They cannot sleep. The anxiety is constant. Some have begun to think about suicide.

When Sánchez called his wife in Miami—more than six thousand five hundred miles away, across the Atlantic Ocean—he told her, "Honey, I'm free now, but they sent me to Africa." She was devastated. García, who had paid taxes and run a legitimate business, now asks himself: "What's happening with us Cubans? I left a dictatorship only to enter into a form of terrorism." Sánchez is more direct: "They brought us here illegally. It all happened without our consent, by force. We were kidnapped. It's a thousand times better to be in Honduras than here. I would never have agreed to this." The Department of Homeland Security declined to explain the selection criteria for sending migrants to Africa or what their legal status would be in the Central African Republic, referring questions to the State Department. No answers have been provided. The deportees remain in Bangui, confined to a hotel in a country they do not know, speaking languages no one around them understands, with no clear idea of what comes next.