Inside the US system deporting migrants through African countries

Stepping onto the tarmac at Bangui airport in the Central African Republic for the first time, Nika*, a 32-year-old Iranian woman, was in shock.

It was the evening of 12 June 2026. Nika had just spent 12 hours aboard a plane specially chartered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport her, alongside around 10 other people – Syrians, Georgians, Afghans and Iraqis.

Her legs had been shackled and her hands cuffed to a chain fixed around her waist, even when she tried to eat.

Officers who met her in Bangui communicated through gestures. None spoke her language.

“I didn't understand anything that was happening to me. I wondered whether I was going to be sent to another prison,” Nika recounted.

She had discovered where she was going only a few hours earlier, in mid-flight, by looking at the navigation screen.

The Central African Republic was a country she knew nothing about, and one the US warns its own citizens not to visit, citing risks including “kidnapping or terrorism”. Screenshot from a CNN report on Nika, an Iranian woman deported by the United States to the Central African Republic in June 2026.

Much of her youth was spent protesting against the Iranian government, Nika said, and her activism had made her a target of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

She left Iran in March 2024 amid continued repression of the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement, which emerged after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022. The United Nations accused Iranian authorities of crimes against humanity.

After reaching the US, Nika was imprisoned. In May, after 14 months in detention, she was released from Richwood Correctional Centre, one of the prisons ICE has turned into a migrant detention centre.

Her asylum claim was still being processed, but she already had a protection known as withholding of removal, which prevented the US from sending her back to Iran. A US judge had found that she risked persecution if she returned.

Nika moved in with her uncle in Los Angeles and thought a new life was beginning. But 12 days after her release, ICE summoned her and arrested her again.

“They took my fingerprints, collected my biometric data and carried out a DNA test … Then they told me, 'Put your hands above your head',” Nika said.

An officer then told her she was going to be deported.

Earlier in the year, Trump had declared himself “ready to help” Iranian people in their “aspiration for freedom”.

“They played with me,” she said. An aerial view of Richwood Correctional Center, an ICE detention facility in Monroe, Louisiana.

A route through another country

What happened to Nika is part of a practice that has become common since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.

When the US cannot send someone back to their home country, the administration now looks for another country willing to receive them – a third country.

Sometimes this is because their country of origin refuses to take them back. More often, as with Nika, they have legal protection against being returned there.

Until recently, people granted withholding of removal were allowed to remain in the United States. US law does not itself ban deportation to a third country, but such removals were generally rare.

Sending people to third countries has now “become the main tool for getting around the ban on refoulement”, Nika's lawyer Sahar Jalili Pawelski said.

International law prohibits returning people to a country where they risk persecution.

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The US administration has reached dozens of agreements with third countries, including at least 12 in Africa, the consortium found. They include countries regularly criticised over their human rights records, such as Equatorial Guinea.

In theory, US authorities must give people facing deportation enough warning to allow them to challenge the country they are being sent to.

“By the time we learn that a client is at risk of deportation to a third country, they are already in the air. It's a race against time that the law cannot win,” US immigration lawyer Meredith Yoon said.

On Friday, a federal appeals court reminded the administration of its duty to give notice, ruling that a deportation carried out without sufficient warning or an opportunity to challenge the destination was unlawful.

The White House said those being deported were the “worst of the worst”.

Forced return

Rabbiatu Kuyateh, a 58-year-old woman from Sierra Leone, was deported to Accra, Ghana, in November 2025 after living in the United States for almost 30 years.

She had worked as a nurse, raised her son Mohamed and cared for her parents before ICE arrested her during an annual “routine” check-in.

On arrival in Ghana, she was taken to a hotel. Four days later, immigration officers came to take her to Sierra Leone.

Kuyateh refused.
Other deportees secretly filmed what happened next. Footage shows Ghanaian immigration officers grabbing her by the arms and legs, dragging her across the hotel floor and outside towards a vehicle.

“Help me! I don't want to go! I can't go to Sierra Leone! I'm in danger there!” Kuyateh cried as she clung to one of the lawyers at the scene.

She was eventually forced into the vehicle. Screenshots from two videos showing Rabbiatu Kuyateh being dragged along the ground by Ghanaian immigration officers during her forced transfer to Sierra Leone.

Kuyateh's US immigration file recorded her account of being detained and raped by government forces during Sierra Leone's civil war. It also said her brother was detained and tortured in 2014 because of their father's political activities.

A US judge had granted her protection against removal to Sierra Leone partly for those reasons.

Kuyateh has since fled again. She now lives alone, far from her family and her 34-year-old son in the US, in a country she does not want identified.

When journalists from RFI sister station France 24, a partner in the consortium, met her, she was still reeling from the brutality of what she had been through.

“I worked as a nurse for more than 20 years … I became a nurse manager during Covid. People died in my arms when their loved ones couldn't be there,” she told France 24.

“I was never a criminal. I paid my taxes. I obeyed the law. All I asked of America was to be allowed to stay.”

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'Chain refoulement'

The two transfers – first from the US to Ghana, then from Ghana to Sierra Leone – amount to what is known as "chain refoulement", Ghanaian lawyer Oliver Barker-Vormawor said.

The term describes a process in which someone is moved to a third country that then sends them to a place where they risk persecution, torture or other serious harm.

In the days after Kuyateh's arrest, Barker-Vormawor publicly condemned her treatment and launched legal action. Proceedings are still under way, but the US has continued sending deportees to Ghana.

The practice amounts to a form of “outsourcing”, Barker-Vormawor added.

“I am convinced that the United States is using Ghana to do its dirty work. I would even say they are engaged in 'human laundering'.”

Ghana did not respond to requests for an interview. However, its authorities have previously said that, in the name of pan-Africanism and regional solidarity, the country would accept only citizens of member states of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas).

The US State Department said the government would use “every lawful means to remove people who have no right to remain in the United States”. It declined to comment on agreements and diplomatic exchanges with the countries involved, referring questions about deportation operations to ICE.

Sending people through another country allows Washington to try to distance itself from what happens afterwards, said Mike Bochenek, a legal adviser at the NGO Human Rights Watch.

“The government is using third-country deportations to circumvent its international obligations, including the ban on sending someone to a country where they could be in danger, he said.

"Once these people are outside the United States, the unspoken bet seems to be that the third country will eventually send them back to their country of origin anyway. So it is an indirect way of sending them back into danger.”

A return already arranged?

For Mohammed*, a 23-year-old Guinean man, that danger was being imprisoned again. That is what happened.

Mohammed was a law student in Conakry and an activist with the RPG, the party of former president Alpha Condé, when he was arrested in September 2023. He was taken to a prison in the western city of Kindia, where he said he was repeatedly tortured.

A medical certificate seen by the consortium shows that he was admitted to Kindia hospital in October 2023. It records “trauma and multiple bruises to the face and body” following “beatings inflicted over several days”.

Soldiers later took several prisoners outside and shot one of them, Mohammed said. He used the confusion to escape into the bush.

His family then arranged for him to travel to the US, where one of his uncles lived. Once there, a judge granted him protection against being returned to Guinea.

A few months later, Mohammed was nevertheless deported to Ghana.

He stayed there for just 48 hours, without a passport or access to a telephone, in a hotel guarded around the clock by soldiers. When he asked for his passport and phone, he was told he would get them back only once he had returned to “his country”.

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“They told us, 'Everything was arranged before you came here … Your final destination will be your country. That's our agreement with the Americans',” Mohammed said.

Two days later, he was taken near the airport and presented to representatives of Guinea's embassy in Accra. He did not resist because, he said, he feared they would use force against him. He boarded a flight to Conakry.

Once there, he hid at the home of a distant relative before being arrested again and taken to Conakry central prison. His family has since managed to secure his release through its connections. Mohammed now lives in a neighbouring country.

The speed of the sequence suggests his return to Guinea may have been arranged before he even left the United States, said his US lawyer Amanda Sullivan.

“This kind of transfer takes time to organise. It seems unlikely that a transfer to Guinea could have been organised in so few days. How could the Ghanaian authorities have known they needed to send him back if everything hadn't already been arranged?”

Whatever happened, Ghana could not “be considered a safe country”, Sullivan added, and the US had at the very least “turned a blind eye to the risk that Mohammed would subsequently be sent back to Guinea”.

Most of the West African deportees Ghana has received have already been sent home, the consortium found.

Ghana, however, has presented its decision to accept deportees as an act of “compassion”, “pan-Africanism” and “solidarity with Africans”.

“We don't want to leave them at the mercy of ICE and draconian immigration policies … We want to welcome them here, home,” Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa said. Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa speaks at a press conference in Moscow on 17 August 2026.

Transit through Sierra Leone

In some countries, the temporary nature of the arrangement is explicit. Sierra Leone is one of them. A colour leaflet examined by the consortium and given to people on arrival in Freetown is titled Information for Third Country Nationals in Transit.

“Your stay in Sierra Leone is ONLY for transit, while the necessary arrangements are made to return you to your country of origin,” it states.

Another line reads: “You have NOT been deported to Sierra Leone as your final destination.”

The document also sets out what should happen if repatriation cannot be arranged within 14 days. The case must be referred to Sierra Leone's Foreign Ministry with a “resolution plan”.

Part of the process has been entrusted to private company Kenvah Solutions under a 12-month contract with Sierra Leone's government worth $1.5 million. The firm describes itself as an “operational and humanitarian” service provider.

Its director, Patrick Robin, previously worked in the humanitarian sector, including with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the American Red Cross and World Vision.

Kenvah said it handles the reception, temporary accommodation and monitoring of deportees, as well as organising their repatriation. Decisions on asylum, refugee status and protection against refoulement remain the responsibility of Sierra Leone's authorities. The Information for Third Country Nationals in Transit leaflet given to deportees on their arrival in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leonean authorities did not allow local lawyers to speak with deportees, information gathered by the consortium shows.

By 8 September, Sierra Leone had received 38 people deported from the US, all of whom had since been returned to their countries of origin.

Several consortium journalists, including from RFI, tried to travel to Sierra Leone to meet the deportees. Accreditation was initially granted but revoked the day before their planned arrival.

RFI nevertheless reached one of them by telephone.
He told RFI he had fled Ghana after being exposed as gay and persecuted by his community, and had been granted protection in the US against being returned there. He tried unsuccessfully to stop his deportation to Ghana.

He is now in hiding in a neighbouring country, where he fears for his safety.

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Sierra Leone's government said in a statement that it took “its international obligations seriously”, but that questions about protections these people had received in the United States were the responsibility of the US government.

Washington has included safeguards in its agreements – at least on paper.

Most agreements reviewed during the investigation require African countries receiving deportees to respect their fundamental rights and comply with international refugee law or the Convention against Torture. The same guarantees appear from one document to another, sometimes word for word.

Documents involving South Sudan show Washington going further, requiring those commitments to appear in the authorities' official response.

“LANGUAGE TO BE INCLUDED IN THE RESPONSE,” reads a US diplomatic note dated 10 May 2025.

Another passage states: “South Sudan will treat these individuals in a manner consistent with its international legal obligations on human rights, including those arising from the Convention against Torture.” Screenshot of a US diplomatic note sent to South Sudanese authorities on 10 May 2025.

Blurred responsibility

The agreements are symptomatic of Washington's wider strategy, said US immigration lawyer Meredith Yoon.

“With these agreements, the US is delegating the reception of these deportees to other countries, without worrying about the consequences.”

In South Sudan, the first eight migrants transferred there were taken straight to a high-security compound in Juba.

More than five months after their arrival, some remain arbitrarily detained there, without contact with the outside world or access to their lawyers or families.

A US Senate Foreign Relations Committee report published in February followed a 10-month investigation into third-country deportations.

It found that in at least “one country, US officials told committee investigators they had been instructed by Trump administration officials not to check how deportees were being treated”. Mexican migrant Jesus Munoz Gutierrez, who was deported from the US to South Sudan as part of its immigration crackdown, is repatriated to Mexico from Juba airport on 6 September 2025.

Nika's lawyer, Sahar Jalili Pawelski, is still seeking to reopen her case and bring her back to the United States. But with Nika now in the Central African Republic, beyond US jurisdiction, the legal process is more complicated.

Handing someone over to a third country “does not make US obligations disappear”, said Linda Gordon, a lawyer at the Human Rights Centre Investigations Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

In practice, however, the system blurs the lines of accountability.

“These agreements somehow place all of this in a zone that is completely beyond the reach of the law," said Laura Bingha, a lawyer and researcher specialising in international refugee law and human rights.

"And that creates a lot of ambiguity about the obligations of receiving states in Africa and in other parts of the world,”

This grey area makes it difficult to pin down responsibility. The US transfers someone to a third country, which then takes responsibility for them. If they are later sent back to their country of origin, it becomes harder to determine who is accountable for what happens next.

People caught in the system can end up in a legal “no man's land”, said Alma David, a lawyer with Novo Legal Group and a leading migrant rights advocate in North America.

“The international system was not designed for this situation,” David said, describing people who are effectively “sold to another country”.

* Names followed by an asterisk have been changed at the request of those interviewed.

► Forbidden Stories is a Paris-based journalism network that coordinates cross-border investigations.

This article has been adapted from the original version in French by Florence Morice.