The United States is violating international law by deporting migrants to African countries where they have no ties, NGO Human Rights Watch said on Thursday, accusing Washington of using deportation to remote destinations as a deterrent to immigration.
United States deportation policy has expanded sharply since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, with his administration striking agreements with governments in Africa, Latin America and the Pacific to receive foreign nationals who cannot legally be returned to their own countries.
More than 500 people have since been deported from the US to African countries other than their own, according to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data cited by Human Rights Watch.
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A separate investigation published by the Forbidden Stories journalism consortium in September estimated that around 25,000 people had been deported to destinations worldwide under the third-country deportation programme.
Human Rights Watch said the policy “violates international human rights law and is designed to instrumentalise human suffering as a deterrent to migration”.
Inside the US system deporting migrants through African countries
‘The point is to scare people’
The organisation said it interviewed 24 people who had been deported from the US to six African countries – Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini and South Sudan.
Some described being kept in chains during flights of up to 18 hours and said they were not told where they were being taken.
The rights group also cited an unnamed US official who told a US Senate hearing that the choice of distant destinations was intended in part to frighten other migrants.
“With countries like Palau or Eswatini, the point is that the administration can threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere,” the official was quoted as saying. “The point is to scare people.”
Human Rights Watch said Washington had also deported at least a dozen LGBTQI+ people to African countries where same-sex relations are criminalised or heavily repressed.
The group warned that transferring people to countries where they face persecution or serious abuse could breach the international legal principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits states from sending people to places where they face severe human rights violations.
Many of the agreements underpinning the programme remain secret or only partly disclosed, Human Rights Watch said, making it difficult to establish the conditions under which migrants are accepted or what incentives are offered to participating governments.
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The global machinery built to carry out Trump’s mass deportation drive
The growing network of deportation agreements has also drawn attention to the pressure Washington is placing on African governments to cooperate with its migration policies.
An investigation by French news agency AFP earlier this year found that the US had used diplomatic and economic leverage in negotiations, including threats of higher tariffs, restrictions on the issuing of visas and cuts to development aid.
Burundi became the latest country to sign up this month, becoming the 15th African nation to agree to receive US deportees despite facing severe economic and humanitarian pressures of its own.
(with newswires)
