MIAMI— Brayan Sánchez spent nearly a decade building a life in South Florida: a commercial driver's license, a pressure-washing side business, a daily commute to work. On May 13, that commute ended when immigration agents intercepted him on his way to the job site. Ten weeks later, he was on a plane bound for a country he had never heard of.
Sánchez and five other men — Cuban nationals Omar Rodríguez, Arístides Fernández, Yasmany Moreno and Daniel Lázaro Fuente, plus Ecuadorian Mauricio Alvarado — say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement gave them no warning before flying them to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, on July 30. All six had been living in Florida before their arrests. They are now asking members of Congress to help bring them home.
Arrested on the Way to Work
Sánchez, 26, grew up in Juticalpa, in Honduras's Olancho department, and arrived in the United States at 16. By this year he held a commercial trucking license and ran his own pressure-washing company. Agents detained him on May 13 as he headed to his job in South Florida, then moved him through immigration facilities in Colorado, Arizona, California and finally the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas, where he spent more than eight weeks before the flight.
Sánchez says he believed he had some form of legal protection against removal — the exact nature of that claim is described differently across his own retellings, sometimes as an asylum matter, other times as a standing court order tied to threats against his family in Honduras. Whatever its precise legal footing, Sánchez maintains ICE never gave him the chance to raise it. "It was never voluntary — nobody ever mentioned Africa to me," he told 14ymedio by video call from Bangui.
A Shackled Flight to an Unfamiliar Continent
The six men's accounts of the journey line up closely: agents cuffed their hands, feet and waists before boarding, and the flight ran roughly 21 hours, with stops in Senegal and Nigeria, before touching down in Bangui. One deportee, Alvarado, described the ordeal to Expreso.ec bluntly: "It was complicated — they violated our rights." Sánchez says an officer warned the group the night before departure that refusing to board would carry consequences: "If you don't board the plane, we'll beat you," he recalled to Reportarsinmiedo.
Stuck in a Bangui Hotel
Since landing on July 31, the group has been held at the Maison Confort hotel in Bangui's Lakouanga neighborhood, which they say houses a total of 36 men deported from the United States — with the six Latin Americans making up the only Spanish-speaking contingent among them. Moreno, one of the Cuban deportees, described the confusion surrounding their case to El Diario de Hoy: "They don't know what to do with us." Sánchez says local officials told the group they'd be housed for 90 days, possibly renewable, but with no guarantees beyond that: "They told us we'll get 90 days at the hotel," he told La Prensa Honduras. Fernández and Moreno say they've since developed gastrointestinal illness and allergic reactions, complicated by a language barrier with local doctors.
The Price Tag Behind the Policy
The flight that carried Sánchez's group was not an isolated event — it was the second deportation flight the Central African Republic has accepted under a bilateral agreement signed with Washington on May 18, worth a reported $81 million. A first flight of 25 people — mostly from Turkey, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and Tibet — landed in Bangui in June. Separately, the U.S. has committed roughly $85 million to the International Organization for Migration for broader operations inside the Central African Republic, a separate funding stream from the direct removal agreement. Asked generally about the practice, a DHS spokesperson told CBS News the administration is "using every tool available to remove illegal aliens from our communities."
Part of a Widening, Little-Understood Pipeline
The Central African Republic is one of at least 13 sub-Saharan African nations — a list that also includes Rwanda, Ghana, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo — that have signed agreements to accept deportees with no citizenship or ties to those countries, according to Amnesty International. Legal advocates at Just Security say migrants are routinely given no advance warning and no real opportunity to contest a third-country placement, with many first learning their destination while already in the air.
Cuban nationals have been swept into this pipeline before. A Cuban man was among five men deported to Eswatini, in southern Africa, in July 2025 — more than a year before Sánchez's case — and remains in detention there; his lawyer told PBS he went on a hunger strike after months held without charge. What's shifting now, according to OnCubaNews, is the pace and visibility of Cuban and other Latin American nationals being routed through a system that, until recently, drew far less attention than deportations to Mexico or Central America.
Miami Pushes for Answers
Sánchez's wife, Caren Cáceres, hand-delivered a letter to Rep. María Elvira Salazar's Miami office on August 12, asking the congresswoman to intervene on behalf of all six men. She and community advocates are also seeking meetings with Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart and Sen. Rick Scott, hoping Republican officials with sway over immigration policy toward Cuba and Honduras might press the administration for answers. As of this writing, Salazar's office has not issued a public response, and Honduran officials have offered only a "voluntary return" option — one Sánchez says he cannot accept given the threats that pushed him to leave Honduras in the first place.
For now, Sánchez, Fernández, Rodríguez, Moreno, Fuente and Alvarado remain in Bangui with no confirmed timeline for return. Whether Salazar, Díaz-Balart or Scott engage publicly in the coming days may determine whether the case gains traction in Washington — or becomes one more entry in a fast-growing, poorly tracked list of third-country removals.
