Denied Due Process; Some Returned to Danger in Home Countries
- The United States has sent more than 500 people whom it cannot deport to their own countries, because of the danger they would face, there to various countries in Africa where they have no connections, without giving them a meaningful chance to contest their removals to these countries.
- Some of the people have been detained upon arrival. Many, if not most, have been left with no practical option but to return to their home countries regardless of the harm they face there.
- The United States should stop deporting asylum seekers and refugees to third countries that lack the capacity to provide full and fair asylum procedures, and these countries should refuse to receive people under these conditions.
(Washington, DC) – The Trump administration is sending hundreds of people who can’t be deported to their own countries, because of the danger they would face, to African countries where they have no connections, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Many have been left with no practical option but to return to their home countries regardless of the harm they face there.
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The 125-page report, “‘To Scare People’: US Expulsions of Third-Country Nationals to Countries in Africa,” documents that US authorities denied the more than 500 people transferred to third countries a meaningful chance to contest their removals or to articulate their fears of being removed to these countries. Some countries arbitrarily detained people they had accepted, and some have sent people onward to the risk of persecution or torture in their home countries, violating the international law principle of nonrefoulement.
“Deporting people to countries where they have never set foot is part of a US policy designed to cause human suffering as a means to deter migration,” said Michael Garcia Bochenek, interim US program director at Human Rights Watch. “Because the US government uses these agreements to shirk its responsibilities and to deprive people of their due process rights, the African governments that have entered into these agreements should terminate or suspend them.”
Human Rights Watch researchers conducted remote and in some cases in-person interviews between February and July 2026 with 24 third-country nationals transferred from the United States to 6 countries in Africa: Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, and South Sudan.
Some of the people sent to these countries face the prospect of persecution and other serious harm in the receiving countries. The United States sent at least a dozen people who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) to African states that criminalize same-sex relations or public same-sex romantic conduct. These included refugees who had been granted protection in the United States based on the likelihood they would be persecuted in their home countries because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Their deportation trapped them in situations in which it was neither safe to return home nor possible to obtain effective protection in the third country.
The people interviewed consistently described abusive treatment during their flights from the United States, during which they were shackled, sometimes for 18 hours or more, and received little or no information about their destination.
How the third-country nationals deported from the United States are treated upon arrival varies from country to country. In some cases, people being deported have not had access to needed medications or treatments for ongoing serious medical conditions.
A 35-year-old man from Ethiopia who had fled to the United States after being imprisoned and tortured in his home country had been denied asylum because he had crossed the border irregularly, but a US immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal,” a bar on returning him to Ethiopia because of the likelihood he would again be tortured there. He said that when he refused to sign a voluntary departure form to send him to Chad, an ICE agent signed it himself.
“We were chained and handcuffed, legs, hands, stomach” on the flight, he said. “We could not stand up. When I had to use the bathroom, they didn’t even take off the chains.”
After arriving in Cameroon, he had repeated visits from representatives of the International Organization for Migration. “Every time they come, they ask the same thing: ‘Do you want to go back to your home?’ But every time I tell them, ‘I’m not going. Stop asking me that. I don’t want to die,”‘ he told Human Rights Watch in March.
The threat of removal to a third country is part of the Trump administration’s policy of mass deportations. In practice, third-country removals have been used to frighten people into leaving before being thrown into the downward spiral of detention and deportation to unknown destinations. An unnamed US official told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that in fact, the purpose of third-country national transfers was to terrorize: “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 said. “The point is to scare people.”
The US government violates its domestic and international nonrefoulement obligations by sending people to places where they would face persecution, torture, or certain other serious threats to their lives or safety, or where they would likely be subjected to onward deportations to face such threats, Human Rights Watch said. It also deprives people of a meaningful opportunity to contest their removals to these countries and articulate any risk of abuse they may face if removed there. In December, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the third-country removal policy violates the Due Process clause of the US constitution or otherwise violates statutory bars against removing people to the risk of being tortured. The court has allowed the government to continue third-country deportations for now.
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The United States should stop deporting asylum seekers and refugees to third countries that lack the capacity to provide full and fair asylum procedures and in the absence of formal, transparent agreements that ensure they will have access to such procedures.
These governments should also respect the principle of nonrefoulement and ensure the dignity, security, and fundamental rights of all persons under their jurisdiction, including third-country nationals whose removal they have accepted.
“Several of these African governments are not only complicit in US abuses but have violated the human rights of these deported people themselves, including with arbitrary detention and in some cases sending them back to countries where they fled danger,” Bochenek said. “These countries should not detain people without a clear legal basis, and they should not coerce or send anyone to their home country or another country where they would face a risk of persecution, torture, or other serious harm.”
