At Least 13 African Governments Signed Up for U.S. Deportation Plans. Some Have Violated the Deportees’ Human Rights

A U.S. 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.

At least 13 African governments have since said yes, according to the Deportation Project’s count.

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

That brings the consortium’s global count to 35 countries.

Some reports add a 14th African country, Libya, whose government denies any deal.

Much of this account draws 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 made public 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 U.S. judge ruled she could not be deported to Sierra Leone.

That 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 14 people deported to Ghana on a separate Sept. 5, 2025, flight sued the Ghanaian government for unlawful detention.

Ghana’s government said the group was 13 Nigerians and one Gambian, but court documents and RFI reporting showed deportees from Liberia, Mali and Togo as well.

A separate U.S. lawsuit, filed on behalf of five of them, 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.”

Ghana’s government soon said it had already sent all 14 home, even as lawyers said 11 were still being held at a military camp outside Accra.

All were eventually returned to their home countries, where lawyers said some could face torture.

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.

That 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 on Dec. 8, 2025, at wow.dhs.gov.

Forty-four Ghanaian nationals appear on it as of this report, 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 in the database describe charges incorrectly, and DHS confirmed the errors after being asked.

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

When Cato Institute researcher David Bier analyzed the site after its launch, it listed fewer than 10,000 people out of more than 280,000 ICE arrests since January 2025.

DHS says the site now lists more than 40,000 people.

Of those listed at the time of his analysis, Bier found 56 percent carried no violent charge or conviction at all.

Even by the U.S. 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.

Twelve other African governments have made their own arrangements.

A 14th case, Libya, remains disputed.

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 U.S.-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 U.S. attention.

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

Two months later, a $124 million health agreement followed.

That same month brought a $1.8 billion mining concession to a U.S.-backed firm.

Cameroon

Under Cameroon’s agreement, at least five LGBTQ+ people have been held for months without legal access.

They had already been granted U.S. 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, according to Third Country Deportation Watch’s records.

Central African Republic

One gap sets the Central African Republic’s deal apart from the others.

It does not require Washington to disclose which transferred people a U.S. 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.

Congo

Congo took 15 people in April, mostly Latin Americans.

Its deal was signed the same season Washington brokered a Rwanda-Congo peace agreement.

It came days before a U.S. 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 asked Washington to 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. military base in Djibouti for weeks while it appealed to the Supreme Court.

Rwanda

Rwanda’s deal promised much and delivered little.

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

Washington paid $7.5 million.

Only seven people ever arrived.

Government spokesperson Yolande Makolo publicly confirmed the payment.

That deal came alongside a separate U.S.-brokered critical minerals agreement and a Rwanda-Congo peace deal.

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

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

Eswatini

Eswatini’s arrangement shows how little oversight follows the money.

Its government 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.

It remains 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.

Its government initially rejected an agreement that came with no U.S. funding attached.

In February 2026, it signed a different one, 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 health cooperation agreement.

Burundi was already absorbing more than 200,000 refugees fleeing violence in 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.

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

That 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.

Kampala 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 U.S. 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 U.S. authorities.

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

That 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.”

Libya’s rival authorities, the Tripoli-based government and the eastern-based armed forces, both issued statements in May 2025 rejecting reports of a deal.

Third Country Deportation Watch lists the date of any Libyan agreement as unknown and says no transfers have been completed.

Until a document surfaces, The Africana Voice treats Libya as disputed, not confirmed.

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.

Washington has separately threatened military action against Nigeria over 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.

Both governments deserve credit for refusing anyway.

Ghana, by contrast, accepted the deal.

It collected tariff relief and visa restoration within days, according to 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

Most of the African arrangements examined here exist in writing, as agreements or diplomatic notes.

Many surfaced only through FOIA requests, court filings or leaked cables.

Libya is the exception, with no document public at all.

Mexico’s arrangement does not exist on paper either.

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, and 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.

That 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.

No reporting reviewed for this investigation shows Washington ever asking Ottawa to take non-Canadian deportees.

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

That 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 they will not accept anyone with a violent or serious criminal record.

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

These agreements show a different reality on paper.

Most are set up to receive 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 per person before accepting anyone.

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

Its Council of Chiefs and Congress had opposed the deal for months.

In December 2024, the Bahamas refused entirely.

It paid for that refusal in stages.

Washington paused Bahamian visas in January 2026.

A 12.5 percent tariff from its largest trading partner followed in July, arriving alongside China’s expanding investment in the country.

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.

Trump’s administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate agreements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, according to internal government records The Washington Post reviewed.

Even the Paper Trail Is Being Erased

On Sept. 15, ICE quietly removed detainees with final removal orders from its public locator system, according to an Associated Press investigation published Sept. 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

Agreements that have been made public largely commit receiving governments to the same promises of 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.

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

Guyana’s approach is not a complete solution.

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 that the United States fund genuine integration rather than temporary hotel stays, and real legal status instead of transit leaflets.

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

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

Nations that accepted her, and dozens like her, owe her more than a diplomatic assurance.

They owe her the promise, kept.

Methodology note: Reporting for this investigation 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, Human Rights Watch, The Washington Post and the BBC. DHS’s own “Worst of the Worst” database (wow.dhs.gov) is cited directly, alongside DHS’s acknowledged errors on that database. Counts of African agreements vary by source. RFI reported at least 12, France 24 reported 13 and other reports listed 14, including Libya. The Africana Voice counts 13 agreements supported by published documents or reporting and treats Libya as disputed.

Updated Sept. 25, 2026, to clarify the number of African agreements, label Libya’s status as disputed, correct details about the Ghana deportees, and update figures on the DHS database.