About once a week, attorney Alma David hears from one of her clients in the Central African Republic that police there kidnapped them to extort them for money.
David is one of the lawyers leading the fight against third-country removals — when the Trump administration sends an immigrant to a country where they have no ties.
“They actually are taken to a police station and put in a cell, and there’s variations on this, but there have been incidents where they’re told if they don’t come up with the money, they’re going to be detained for months,” David said.
Sometimes the International Office of Migration, part of the United Nations, has gone to bail out the people kidnapped in the Central African Republic, and sometimes they have figured out how to pay the amount requested by the police, David said.
According to data gathered by Human Rights First and Refugees International, the U.S. government has agreements with 36 countries to receive people who are not their citizens or residents.
Five of those countries have the highest level travel advisory possible from the U.S. State Department — Level 4 Do Not Travel. That includes the Central African Republic, as well as Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, South Sudan and Uganda.
The State Department lists five more of the countries as Level 3 Reconsider Travel. Four of those have areas that the State Department calls out as Level 4.
That means more than a quarter of the countries where the U.S. government has agreements to send immigrants — including asylum seekers and people who have won protection from deportation to their home countries because of likely persecution there — are places that the U.S. government tells its own citizens to avoid.
“Across the board, I would say that it’s very concerning that the U.S. government is signing agreements with countries that, per its own State Department, are deemed not safe and then sending very vulnerable people who fled persecution and torture there,” said Savi Arvey, director of policy for refugee and immigrant rights with Human Rights First.
The agreements that the Trump administration has signed with the countries say that the receiving countries will follow international law regarding the treatment of refugees and not subject any of the people they receive to persecution or torture.
“Once somebody is deported, the U.S. government feels that it has no responsibility toward that person,” said Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International. “Once the person is off the plane, it’s not our problem.”
She said that’s not much different from the lack of attention that the U.S. has paid historically to people deported to their own countries, despite the risks. To really see if the asylum system was functioning properly, she said, the U.S. would need to track how many deported asylum seekers end up killed or otherwise harmed by the groups they fled, but it never has. Now, the third-country agreements add another layer of laissez-faire to the U.S.’s approach to removing people from its territory.
That includes the issue of refoulement — returning a person to a place where they are likely to be persecuted or tortured — which is illegal under international law.
Several countries, including Equatorial Guinea, Ghana and Sierra Leone, have quickly returned people to their countries of origin despite their claims of fear to return there, David said. That includes people who won protection from deportation to their home countries because they proved to a U.S. immigration judge that they were likely to be harmed there.
“In all of these third countries, people are told in no uncertain terms that they’re not welcome to stay there,” David said. “The governments do not see themselves as permanent hosts to these people.”
Arvey said that some people have agreed to return to their home countries despite their fears, but that still counts as refoulement to her because they faced coercive conditions such as threat of detention or violence.
“That’s not a true voluntary return,” Arvey said.
Schacher said many people who have accepted a voluntary return have likely tried to flee their home countries quickly upon return, and that they would have more resources to figure out how to flee in a part of the world where they’re more familiar and speak the language.
Though the United Nations considers arbitrary detention a human rights violation that can lead to torture, people in several of the receiving countries have ended up either forcibly detained by the receiving governments — as in the case of Eswatini — or de facto detained because conditions outside the facility where the government is holding them are so dangerous, according to David and Arvey. For many, that lack of freedom comes after months in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and persecution in their home countries, compounding the trauma they experience when they are once again deprived of freedom in these unfamiliar countries, David said.
In the Central African Republic, many of the people sent there are afraid of the kidnappings and choose to stay in their rooms, David said. So far, the U.S. has sent 92 people there, according to Human Rights First and Refugees International.
Several Nicaraguans who sought asylum in the U.S. to escape the brutal Ortega regime told Confidencial that they were afraid to leave their rooms in the Central African Republic.
Schacher said Muslims are particularly at risk in the country and have faced violence. The U.S. deported an Afghan man there whose family helped the U.S. military.
In Cameroon, which the State Department lists as a Level 2 Exercise Increased Caution, though some areas rise to Level 4, the government initially did not allow those who arrived to leave the compound where officials took them, David said.
She said the U.S. government didn’t return identification documents, including passports, to the people it sent to Cameroon, and the Cameroonian government said it could not protect them from arrest if they left the compound.
“It’s always under the guise of their protection,” David said. “All of it is very shady, and very clearly there’s a lot of pretextual stuff going on, but they say it with a totally straight face.”
After the people held at the compound pushed back through a hunger strike, David said, they received temporary documents from the Cameroonian government that allowed them to go outside during certain hours.
She said at one point, a man entered the compound with the intention of harming the group of immigrants, and the compound guards did nothing to make him leave.
Three countries besides Cameroon have lower level travel advisories for the country as a whole, but areas within those countries have Level 4 designations — Ecuador, Mexico and Panama.
In Mexico, one of those Do Not Travel areas is the border state of Tamaulipas, where U.S. officials hand off non-Mexicans to the Instituto Nacional de Migración. The Mexican agency then buses the people south to the cities of Villahermosa and Tapachula.
Arvey said she’s concerned about the safety of the people sent there, both en route through the Level 4 territory and after reaching southern Mexico. The state of Chiapas, where Tapachula is located, is a Level 3 area. She said the former immigrants also face a high risk of refoulement from Mexico depending on which country they’re from. She said Mexico is busing Hondurans and Guatemalans in particular back to their home countries.
But for David, some of the most concerning violence against the immigrants sent to third countries has happened in a country with a Level 2 designation and no areas of extra concern — Equatorial Guinea. However, State Department human rights reports say that the Central African country’s government has tortured people.
There, media reports of growing violence against the group sent from the U.S. have revealed beatings, arbitrary detention in a hotel-turned-prison and lack of access to medical care or even fresh clothing.
“I think Equatorial Guinea is a powder keg, and something very bad is going to happen soon there,” David said.
The dangers people are facing in these countries are compounded when the country has a record of persecuting people from their identity backgrounds, such as people from the LGBTQ+ community sent to Cameroon, where same-sex relationships are illegal and punished with prison time.
LGBTQ+ Cameroonians have historically won their asylum cases, David said. Now the U.S. is sending LGBTQ+ immigrants there to face that persecution.
