Fourteen African Governments Signed Up for U.S. Deportation Plans. Some Have Violated the Deportees’ Human Rights.

A US Cabinet secretary told the world exactly what he wanted African governments to do.

“We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in April 2025.

He added that the farther from America, the better.

Fourteen African governments have since said yes.

So have 17 nations across the Caribbean and Latin America, two in Asia, two in Europe, and Mexico, which has no formal agreement.

This account draws heavily on The Deportation Project, a cross-border investigation coordinated by Forbidden Stories with France 24 and more than 20 other newsrooms.

It also draws on Third Country Deportation Watch, a tracking project run jointly by Refugees International and Human Rights First.

Nearly every agreement promises the same thing on paper: safety, dignity, protection from persecution.

Court records, leaked cables and video evidence gathered by that consortium show how often that promise breaks.

They also show how unevenly it breaks.

A Video That Answers Ghana’s Own Foreign Minister

Ghana leads a global campaign demanding reparations for the transatlantic slave trade.

In that same country, video verified by France 24 and Forbidden Stories shows a woman dragged across a hotel floor by the limbs.

Officers forced her into a van bound for the country she had fled.

Rabbiatu Kuyateh spent nearly 30 years building a life in Maryland, according to the France 24 and Forbidden Stories investigation.

A US judge ruled she could not be deported to Sierra Leone.

The judge cited a documented history of rape and detention by government forces during the civil war she fled three decades earlier.

Ghana held her at an Accra hotel for six days.

Officers then forced her onto a flight to Freetown anyway.

Kuyateh described the moment she learned her destination to the consortium.

“I said, ‘Ghana? I’m not from Ghana; what am I going to do there? I only saw Ghana on the map; I don’t know where that is,'” she said.

Of the country that deported her, she said: “I’ve known it as my home.”

Video reviewed by The Africana Voice shows officers in green uniforms and a larger group in plain clothes, including women, dragging her while she resisted.

Report by France 24

Her Ghanaian lawyer, Oliver Barker-Vormawor, was nearby and could not stop it.

He told the consortium the arrangement has a name.

“I might even go on to say, human laundering,” he said.

Kuyateh was not the only person from that period pursuing a legal remedy.

Eleven of fourteen people deported to Ghana on a separate September 5 flight sued the Ghanaian government for unlawful detention.

All but one were Nigerian, the other Gambian, according to reporting by the Associated Press and RFI.

The lawsuit described the group being held in straitjackets for 16 hours in the air.

It described “squalid conditions” once they reached the ground.

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, representing several of the men, told PBS the arrangement “reeks of a scam.”

He added that the United States had “concocted a scheme to use third countries to circumvent what the United States cannot do directly.”

By the time the case reached a Ghanaian court, the government said it had already sent all fourteen home.

The lawsuit meant to protect them arrived too late to matter.

Weeks after Kuyateh’s deportation, a reporter asked Ghana’s foreign minister why his government sends protected people back to danger.

He denied doing so by force.

“Ghana is home to all Africans,” Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa told France 24 English and the Forbidden Stories team.

The claim sits awkwardly beside the footage.

It sits even more awkwardly beside another detail from DHS’s own public deportation database.

DHS calls the database “Worst of the Worst.”

It launched in December at wow.dhs.gov.

Forty-four Ghanaian nationals currently appear on it, facing removal from the United States, even as their government accepts other nations’ deportees.

That figure deserves a caveat DHS itself has already conceded.

CNN found hundreds of entries on the database describe charges incorrectly, and DHS confirmed the errors after being asked.

Independent analysis raises a deeper problem with the database’s name.

Cato Institute researcher David Bier found the site lists fewer than 10,000 people out of more than 280,000 ICE arrests since January 2025.

Of those actually listed, Bier found 56 percent carry no violent charge or conviction at all.

Even by the US government’s own contested count, most of the people it brands “worst of the worst” do not fit that description.

A Continent of Different Hard Choices

Ghana is not alone, and it is not the worst documented case.

Thirteen other African governments have made their own arrangements.

Third Country Deportation Watch’s country-by-country tracking shows the differences between them matter.

Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone signed in January.

It capped acceptance at 300 ECOWAS citizens a year.

Arrivals receive a printed leaflet the moment they land stating their stay is for transit only, according to Third Country Deportation Watch.

A private contractor holds a 1.5 million-dollar US-funded contract to manage their reception.

Most who have passed through have already been sent onward to the countries they fled.

Liberia

Liberia’s path ran as much through diplomacy as through money.

In October, Liberia agreed on humanitarian grounds to accept Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose case had drawn national US attention.

Within five days, Washington extended Liberian travel visas from one year to three, per Third Country Deportation Watch’s documentation.

Two months later came a 124 million dollar health agreement.

That same month brought a 1.8 billion dollar mining concession to a US-backed firm.

Cameroon

Cameroon’s agreement has held at least five LGBTQ+ individuals for months without legal access.

They had already been granted US protection specifically because of their sexual orientation, according to Third Country Deportation Watch.

A Cameroonian lawyer who visited them was later arrested alongside journalists documenting the conditions.

Equatorial Guinea

Equatorial Guinea has taken in 66 people, the largest African total.

Arrivals are held in a hotel owned by the president’s family.

That hotel reportedly doubled as an Ebola quarantine site.

One person wrote directly to researchers tracking the program after being sent back into danger.

“I’m in the middle of war and persecution again,” they wrote, per Third Country Deportation Watch’s records.

The Central African Republic

The Central African Republic’s deal contains a gap none of the others share.

It does not require Washington to disclose which transferred people a US judge has already found likely to face persecution.

CAR’s own border agencies operate under heavy influence from Russia’s Wagner network.

That raises real questions about who is actually deciding anyone’s fate there.

DRC

The Democratic Republic of Congo took 15 people in April, mostly Latin American.

The deal was signed the same season Washington brokered a Rwanda-DRC peace agreement.

It came days before a US company completed a cobalt mining acquisition in the country’s southeast.

One Colombian woman sent there described the toll to the BBC.

“We feel completely adrift,” she said.

South Sudan

South Sudan’s case shows something none of the other African deals do.

Its government asked for real leverage, not cash.

South Sudan requested that Washington lift sanctions on businessman Benjamin Bol Mel, restore visas for South Sudanese nationals, invest in its oil and gas sector, and support its effort to prosecute First Vice President Riek Machar, according to diplomatic notes made public in January 2026.

Nothing in the public record shows the United States delivered on any of it.

South Sudan didn’t even get the narrow deal it thought it signed.

It agreed to receive 13 specific people named on a US list.

Washington sent only one of them, along with seven entirely different people South Sudan had never agreed to take.

South Sudan’s National Security Service runs secret detention sites known as “ghost houses.”

Deaths in custody are common there, with bodies bearing signs of torture reportedly dumped in rivers and ditches.

When a US court found the government had violated an injunction during this transfer, DHS did not bring the men home.

It held them in a shipping container on a US military base in Djibouti for weeks while it appealed to the Supreme Court.

Rwanda

Rwanda’s deal moved faster than any African arrangement, and it was the smallest share ever.

Rwanda signed a memorandum of understanding in June 2025 for up to 250 people.

The United States paid $ 7.5 million.

Only seven people ever arrived.

Government spokesperson Yolande Makolo publicly confirmed the payment.

The deal came alongside a separate US-brokered critical minerals agreement and a Rwanda-DRC peace deal.

In March 2026, the United States sanctioned Rwanda’s own military for supporting M23, an armed group destabilizing eastern DRC.

Rwanda took US money for a migration deal while facing US sanctions for a different kind of interference in the same region.

Eswatini

Eswatini’s arrangement shows what happens when the money itself goes missing.

Eswatini signed in May 2025 for $ 5.1 million, covering up to 160 people.

Only 32 people arrived across five flights.

Eswatini holds them at Matsapha, a maximum-security prison, without charges.

Reporting has found the funds bypassed the finance ministry entirely, landing instead with a disaster management office answering directly to the prime minister.

Eswatini’s own courts have twice dismissed legal challenges to the deal on procedural grounds.

Eswatini is an absolute monarchy where calling for democracy is treated as a crime.

Burundi

Burundi resisted the deal Washington first offered, then signed a different one.

Burundi initially rejected an agreement that came with no US funding attached.

It signed a different one in February 2026, with no cap on the number of transfers.

Twelve people arrived that August.

In the same window, the United States and Burundi signed a separate 129 million dollar health cooperation agreement.

Burundi was already absorbing more than 200,000 refugees fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo when it agreed to take in people from the United States as well.

Cabo Verde

Cabo Verde has taken no one yet, and its own agreement admits why that might be for the best.

Cabo Verde signed an Asylum Cooperative Agreement in November 2025, after Washington threatened a visa ban tied to its citizenship-by-investment program.

The agreement itself describes Cabo Verde as “geographically isolated” and a “Small Island Developing State.”

Cabo Verde has no formal asylum law and no institutional body to process a protection claim.

No transfers have occurred as of this report.

Uganda

Uganda’s numbers on paper and in practice tell two different stories.

Uganda signed an Asylum Cooperative Agreement in July 2025.

Only eight people have actually been transferred there, in April 2026.

Immigration courts have used that same agreement to pretermit, or summarily dismiss, 2,727 pending asylum cases for removal to Uganda.

Most of those cases never result in an actual flight.

They strip the person of their US legal claim on paper, whether or not Uganda ever receives them.

Uganda’s own asylum system has been collapsing under funding cuts, and consensual same-sex conduct remains criminalized there.

Libya

Libya’s government says no deal exists at all, and the one known attempt to test that ended in a standoff on a runway.

In May 2025, the United States bussed 13 migrants toward a military flight bound for Libya.

Libya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly and categorically denied any agreement or coordination with US authorities.

A federal court issued an emergency order blocking the transfer that same day.

The flight never departed.

Human Rights Watch’s Hanan Salah described the attempt bluntly: “It is dystopian to strong-arm a fractured country like Libya… to take in more detainees.”

Some Countries Were Cornered. Others Leaned In.

Not every African government arrived at this deal the same way.

Burkina Faso refused Washington’s overtures outright and faced visa suspension.

Nigeria also refused and faced its own consequences.

Washington threatened military action against Nigeria over separate, unrelated allegations of Christian persecution.

Nigeria’s citizens also appear on the same “Worst of the Worst” database as Ghana’s.

A separate DHS release under wow.dhs.gov lists more than 100 Nigerian nationals facing removal.

Refusal carried a real cost for both countries.

That earns both governments some credit, even in refusal.

Ghana, by contrast, accepted the deal.

It collected tariff relief and visa restoration within days, per France 24’s reporting.

Its foreign minister then publicly denied any coercion.

Those two facts sit side by side in the public record.

Mexico Shows What No Paper Trail Looks Like

Every African deal examined here exists in writing.

Each was eventually disclosed through FOIA requests, court filings, or leaked cables.

Mexico’s does not exist on paper.

Refugees International’s own assessment treats that absence as the central problem.

Roughly 20,000 non-Mexican nationals have been sent to Mexico since January 2025.

That is more than 40 times the total sent to every African nation combined, according to Refugees International’s tally.

Mexico’s government has never published reception guidelines.

It has never disclosed terms.

It has ignored a 2022 Mexican Supreme Court order requiring it to create a legal status mechanism for these arrivals.

ICE told a federal court it sent 7,257 people.

Mexico’s own immigration records, obtained by Refugees International through public records requests, show several thousand more.

IMUMI’s documentation, cited in Refugees International’s report, describes ICE officers marching asylum seekers across the border on foot at remote crossings with no paperwork.

Most were Cuban and Guatemalan.

Detained people reported officers threatening them with “a jail cell in El Salvador or Africa” to force compliance.

That threat is worth sitting with.

Africa is not just a destination in this scheme.

It is a documented, verbalized threat American officers used against a Cuban asylum seeker to make him climb a border wall.

A Continent Named as a Threat, Twice on the Record

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, separately from his eventual acceptance by Liberia, was offered a plea deal in August 2025.

The deal would send him to Costa Rica, a country where his family could visit.

He declined.

ICE told his lawyers within minutes he would instead face Uganda, a country he had never visited.

His attorney described the mechanism without ambiguity in a court filing reported by NBC News, TIME and CBS.

“The government are using their collective powers to force Mr. Abrego to choose between a guilty plea followed by relative safety, or rendition to Uganda,” the filing read.

Two documented cases, months apart, both use an African country by name as the punishment option against a perceived safer alternative.

That is the deterrent value of Africa’s reputation for danger and distance.

American officials have spent that reputation as leverage against people who have never set foot there.

Mexico Gets Asked. Canada Never Does.

Mexico shares a 2,000-mile border with the United States.

It has absorbed the most third-country transfers of any nation on earth.

Canada shares an even longer border, more than 5,500 miles.

Canada has never once been asked.

No reporting reviewed for this investigation shows Washington approaching Ottawa about accepting non-Canadian deportees.

Canada is wealthy, stable, and has a functioning asylum system.

The difference in who gets asked tracks uncomfortably well with which populations Washington considers acceptable to burden.

Caribbean Nations Set Rules That Contradict Washington’s Own Pitch

Eight Caribbean nations and Guyana have signed agreements.

Most include a condition that contradicts Rubio’s own sales pitch, according to each country’s disclosed agreement text as documented by Third Country Deportation Watch.

Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Jamaica and Grenada all specify that no one with a violent or serious criminal record will be accepted.

Rubio’s public case for this program rested on removing dangerous people.

These agreements show a different reality on paper.

Most are receiving ordinary people, screened specifically to exclude the population the policy claims to target.

Some governments pushed back hard before signing.

Antigua’s prime minister said visa restrictions were “issued probably to bully us into signing.”

His government later demanded roughly 75,000 dollars per person before accepting anyone.

Palau’s Senate sued its own president over the deal and lost.

The Council of Chiefs and Congress had opposed it for months.

The Bahamas refused entirely in December 2024.

It paid for that refusal in stages.

The US paused Bahamian visas in January 2026.

A 12.5 percent tariff on its largest trading partner followed in July, arriving conspicuously alongside China’s expanding investment there.

Kosovo and Moldova Show Europe Isn’t Exempt, Just Smaller in Scale

Kosovo agreed to take up to 50 people in exchange for what it wanted most.

That was American backing for its sovereignty recognition and European Union membership bid.

Kosovo has its own documented prison abuse record from a separate deal with Denmark.

Moldova has taken in more than 30 people with no disclosed agreement.

That mirrors Mexico’s opacity on a smaller scale.

What Deportation Costs Beyond a Plane Ticket

Fear of violence is not the only reason people resist these transfers.

Deportation does not strip a person of ownership over a house, a retirement account or stock holdings in the United States.

It strips them of any practical way to manage those assets from a hotel room in Accra or Malabo.

A 401(k) left behind faces the standard early-withdrawal penalty.

That penalty often lands at a steeper nonresident rate.

A house bought with decades of wages requires someone still in the country holding power of attorney.

Kuyateh’s own son described building one such house with his mother in the France 24 interview.

Without someone managing it, that kind of property risks foreclosure.

None of this shows up in a diplomatic note.

A History That Predates This Administration, at a Scale That Does Not

Third-country removal is not new.

Past administrations, including Obama’s, used the provision sparingly.

They used it mostly for Cuban and Venezuelan nationals whose own governments wouldn’t take them back.

In 2017, only 21 people with formal withholding-of-removal protections were sent to third countries.

That is under 2 percent of everyone who held that status.

What changed is scale.

The Trump administration has pledged roughly 410 million dollars across 31 countries, according to Washington Post reporting.

Most of that money went to countries in Africa and Latin America.

Even the Paper Trail Is Being Erased

Six days before this report was finalized, ICE quietly removed detainees with final removal orders from its public locator system.

The change happened on September 15, according to an Associated Press investigation published September 21.

Nearly 16,000 people held that status as of July.

National Immigration Project legal director Michelle Mendez called it plainly.

“It’s just another iteration of disappearing people,” she said.

Eight Somali men held at Guantánamo Bay are among those who vanished from the system this month, the AP found.

ACLU attorney My Khanh Ngo said losing the ability to locate a client makes challenging a removal “nearly impossible.”

Everything documented in this report exists because a paper trail survived.

That trail survived long enough for lawyers, journalists and courts to reconstruct it.

As of this month, the United States has started making the next case harder to trace before it happens.

What African Governments Still Owe the People They Accepted

Every government named in this investigation signed language promising safety and dignity.

Guyana’s government has said it would prefer to receive migrants with skills its labor market needs.

That is a different standard than simply anyone Washington wants gone, according to Third Country Deportation Watch’s reporting.

The request ties to Guyana’s own oil-driven economic boom.

This is not a complete solution.

The vetting still runs through the International Organization for Migration rather than Guyana’s own authorities.

But it shows that Washington wants these deals badly enough to negotiate on terms other than cash.

African governments hold more leverage than most have used.

They could demand the United States fund genuine integration rather than temporary hotel stays.

They could demand real legal status instead of transit leaflets.

Kuyateh remains separated from a son and parents who are all US citizens.

She lives in a country she has asked not be named.

The nations that accepted her, and the dozens like her, owe her more than a diplomatic assurance.

They owe her the promise, kept.

Methodology note: This report draws directly on The Deportation Project, a cross-border investigation led by Forbidden Stories in partnership with France 24, RFI, and more than 20 other newsrooms, and on Third Country Deportation Watch, a joint tracking project of Refugees International and Human Rights First. Additional reporting comes from court filings in D.V.D. v. DHS and related litigation, the Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, NBC News, CNN, the Cato Institute, and the BBC. DHS’s own “Worst of the Worst” database (wow.dhs.gov) is cited directly, alongside DHS’s own acknowledged error rate on that database.