Yasmany Moreno figured it was another transfer between detention facilities, one more stop in a stretch of federal custody that had already run past a year. Instead, when his flight lifted off from Texas before dawn on July 30, an immigration officer waited nearly five hours to tell him where the plane was actually headed: the Central African Republic, a nation Moreno says he had never once heard mentioned before that moment, according to reporting from the Tampa Bay Times, which interviewed Moreno directly from Bangui.
Thirty-six deportees, including several Cuban nationals, made the roughly 21-hour trip together, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles for the duration. A month later, Moreno remains in Bangui with no passport, no legal footing and no clear sense of what happens next.
A shackled flight, a hotel room with a 90-day clock
Moreno, 32, manages both asthma and diabetes; the restrained overnight flight left him ill for four straight days afterward, a detail he shared with the paper. He and the rest of the group have been staying since July 31 at a modest hotel called Maison Confort, tucked into Bangui's busy Lakouanga neighborhood, roughly two miles from the city center. Local authorities have told the group they may need to vacate that room within 90 days, Moreno said, with nothing lined up after that. "Now, I feel like I'm in prison," he told the paper.
From a raft in the Keys to a green card denial
Moreno left Cuba on a raft and washed ashore in the Marquesas Keys, part of Monroe County, in 2016, arriving while the "wet foot, dry foot" policy still let Cuban migrants who set foot on U.S. territory stay under parole. Washington scrapped that framework the following year, under President Obama. Moreno later tried to convert his status into a green card through the Cuban Adjustment Act, but the request was turned down because he filed it after his parole had already lapsed. In the years that followed, he ran a small trucking business hauling freight between Miami and Tampa and helped support his parents outside Orlando. Immigration agents took him into custody in mid-2025 and moved him through a series of facilities before the July 30 flight.
A second Cuban voice: "No human being has the right to do this"
Moreno wasn't the only Cuban passenger with a story to tell reporters. Arístides Fernández, 37, crossed into Arizona in 2021 and spent five years building a routine in South Florida under a work permit valid through 2030, until agents picked him up at a Miami immigration court hearing in January; seven months cycling through jails in several states followed, ending on the same Bangui-bound flight. He calls what happened to him a kidnapping, describing life since as limbo: no rights, no grasp of the local language, and a building he can't leave without paying a guard for an escort. Fernández put it bluntly in remarks carried by the Tampa Bay Times: "no human being has the right to do this to another person."
For a transgender deportee, an added layer of risk
Daniel Fuentes, 31, a transgender Cuban woman who entered the U.S. through the CBP One appointment system in 2024 and later worked at a Miami beauty salon under a humanitarian permit, was arrested on March 23 and held for four months before the flight. In Bangui, she's cut her hair short and altered her voice and mannerisms to move through the city with less risk, and hotel security has told her it isn't safe to go outside at all. "It is a double challenge to live in limbo," she said, in a country where, she added, LGBTQ identity rarely comes up in conversation at all.
Washington's position: once you're out of custody, you're on your own
Asked to explain the deportations, the Department of Homeland Security responded, in a statement to the paper, that it was relying on "all lawful options" as part of what officials framed as the most sweeping deportation campaign the country has run, and argued that its obligation to a deportee ends the moment that person leaves ICE custody. Miami immigration attorney Hector Diaz, who has no connection to any of the six Latin American deportees in Bangui, called that logic a way of dodging where these men and women actually ended up. The Central African Republic has no functioning asylum system, he pointed out, leaving deportees with neither a way to seek protection there nor a path back to the countries they left. "This raises severe due process abuses, along with very serious humanitarian concerns," Diaz said. Notably, the U.S. State Department's own travel guidance urges Americans to avoid the country entirely, citing unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines and terrorism — the same nation the government is actively flying its own deportees into.
The legal fight that opened the door
These removals trace back to a June 2025 Supreme Court order, DHS v. D.V.D., that let the administration resume third-country deportations while the underlying case worked through the courts; the justices split 6-3, with Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson dissenting. A Boston federal judge went further this year, ruling on February 25 that removing people to unfamiliar countries without meaningful notice violates the law — but the First Circuit Court of Appeals froze that decision by a 2-1 margin in mid-March while the government's appeal plays out, allowing flights like the one that carried Moreno to keep departing in the meantime. Legal advocates at Just Security note that the specific terms of the deal allowing the Central African Republic to accept U.S. deportees have never been made public.
A pipeline that's bigger than one flight
Amnesty International tallies more than 100 people whom the U.S. has removed to third countries across the African continent within the last twelve months — a combined figure spanning roughly a dozen nations, including the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Ghana, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea and Liberia, rather than a count specific to Bangui. Moreno's flight wasn't even the first of its kind: an earlier group of roughly two dozen deportees, most of them from Turkey, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan, had already landed in Bangui that June, part of the same pipeline LatinTimes documented in its earlier reporting on the six Latin American deportees now sheltering together at Maison Confort.
Part of a much larger surge in Cuban deportations
Moreno and Fernández's ordeal is playing out against a broader spike in Cuban removals nationally. Florida immigration judges ordered 4,007 Cubans deported in the nine months spanning fiscal year 2026 through last June, per figures TRAC supplied to WLRN — a tally that puts Cuba fourth among nationalities affected statewide. Separately, Department of Homeland Security data from November 2025 counted more than 42,000 Cubans nationwide with final removal orders still outstanding. Relatives of the six-person Bangui group have pushed South Florida's congressional delegation for help: one deportee's wife personally dropped off a written appeal at Rep. María Elvira Salazar's Miami district office in mid-August, and advocates now hope to line up separate sit-downs with Rep. Díaz-Balart and Sen. Scott.
For now, Moreno has no passport, no lawyer on the ground and no country that's agreed to take him back — just a hotel room in a city he'd never heard of a month ago, and a 90-day clock he can't control.
