It was a shell game from the start. Send them to Africa. Hope they disappear. But the Trump administration’s cynical experiment in outsourcing border enforcement is leaking. More than half of the fifteen Latin Americans dumped in the Democratic Republic of Congo back in April have already packed their bags and returned to the very homelands they fled, according to Congolese officials and immigration lawyers.
They had won. U.S. judges agreed they faced death or torture back home. Yet, they went back anyway. Why go back? Because life in a strange, cash-strapped African nation with no safety net isn’t much of an alternative. It is a bureaucratic trap.
Congo is just one cog in the machine. The U.S. has quietly inked deportation deals with at least eight African nations. It is a neat trick. By dumping asylum seekers in third countries under these shadowy agreements, Washington avoids the bad press of direct deportation while effectively forcing desperate people to give up and go home.
Eight have broken. Earlier this week, four Peruvians and three Colombians boarded flights home, assisted by the UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration. The IOM calls these departures “voluntary.” Critics call it a farce. Alma David, a U.S. attorney representing some of the migrants, pointed out the obvious: when you are backed into a corner with zero options, “choice” is an illusion. Another Colombian man paid his own way out of the country.
Some remain stuck. David’s client, a Colombian woman, is still stranded in Congo. So is Adriana Maria Quiroz Zapata. Her case is particularly egregious. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to bring her back to the U.S. last month. Congo didn’t even want her; they openly admitted they couldn’t handle her medical needs. The U.S. shipped her anyway. She is still there.
The Congolese government spun the exodus as a success, claiming it proves the “temporary” nature of the arrangement. More departures are coming. Meanwhile, the legal fallout is spreading. Human rights lawyers just dragged Equatorial Guinea—another U.S. deportation partner—before Africa’s top rights body, accusing them of illegally forcing American deportees back to their home countries. The machine keeps grinding.
