Update, 16 September 2026. This report was published when Reuters had identified “at least five” people who refused to leave the aircraft at Monrovia. The Associated Press, reporting from Dakar on 24 August, identified six: four Cuban men, a Brazilian man and a Cameroonian woman. The Coalition now treats six as the better figure. Reuters did not claim a closed count, and the two reports are not in conflict. The headline above is left as it was published. What is known about where those six people were taken, and what they were told before the aircraft left Liberia, is set out in The plane landed in Monrovia at 12:45.
An Eastern Airlines aircraft landed at Roberts International Airport at Harbel, outside Monrovia, on 20 August. Roughly twenty people were aboard. None was Liberian. A small group refused to leave the aircraft, was escorted off, and then went back aboard. Fifteen people were driven away in a bus by Liberian officials to a building at Marshall, a beach town near the airport. Journalists were not allowed to speak to any of them. Most of those who have since been interviewed had already won an order from an American court forbidding their return to their own countries.
What happened to the five
A United States official told CBS News on the day that the group who went back aboard had an unknown destination. The passage in full:
CBS News, 20 August, reporting a United States official. “A U.S. official, however, told CBS News that after the plane carrying the deportees arrived in Liberia, a small group of them resisted and refused to deplane. They were escorted off the plane, but then returned to it, the official said. Their whereabouts are unknown.”
Two days later Al Jazeera reported what the Reuters news agency had said about the same five people, and marked plainly what it had not checked itself:
Al Jazeera, 22 August. “The Reuters news agency on Friday reported that five of those people refused to leave the plane and were instead transported to Equatorial Guinea. Al Jazeera has not verified the report independently.”
Roughly twenty arrived and fifteen remained. Five is the difference. The Coalition records the two accounts as they stand. On the day, a United States official said their whereabouts were unknown. Two days later a second news agency placed them in Equatorial Guinea, a state that already carries an Alert on this site. Neither government has said where they are. Whether five people were moved from one transit state to a second within hours of arriving in the first is under investigation.
The protection they held
CBS News found the group at Marshall a month later and became the first United States television network to speak to them in person. Its central finding is set out here in full rather than summarised:
“In fact, most of the deportees who agreed to be interviewed won legal protections in American immigration courts, preventing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting them to their home countries because of concerns they could be persecuted or tortured there.”
“But under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance posture to illegal immigration, those with such cases are being targeted for deportation to third countries, as they still lack a valid permanent immigration status, despite their limited legal protections.”
Two of those orders are described. Elvis Rodriguez Venturas, from Honduras, had his removal to Honduras barred by an immigration judge who found he could be harmed there, and had been working lawfully in Texas under that protection until he was detained. He has four children, two of them United States citizens, and a wife in the country.
Elvis Rodriguez Venturas. “I’m concerned. I feel far away, on the other side of the world.”
Carlos Tellez Sanchez, thirty-five, from Venezuela, was granted protection by an immigration judge in 2021 on a finding that he could be persecuted in Venezuela. CBS News set out in one sentence what that order did and did not do:
CBS News, 29 August. “An immigration judge in 2021 granted Tellez Sanchez protection from being sent back to Venezuela, finding that he could be persecuted there. Legally, however, that order did not prevent ICE from deporting him to any other country.”
That sentence is the mechanism this project exists to record. The Coalition has set out separately what the removal regulations require to be done about the country of removal in the hearing itself, and what two courts of appeals said about it in 1998 and 1999, in The rules say the country must be named.
How one man was taken
Tellez Sanchez had been in the United States since 2021, after leaving Venezuela. He worked at a car dealership in Dallas during the day and drove for Uber Eats at night. CBS News could find no criminal charge or conviction against him beyond civil immigration violations. He was detained in December 2025 at what he expected to be a routine immigration appointment, and was held in immigration detention for eight months. He learned where he was being sent a few hours before the flight left, and crossed the Atlantic over fifteen hours in handcuffs. His wife and their five-month-old American son are in Texas, nearly six thousand miles away.
Carlos Tellez Sanchez, speaking in Spanish. “I do not understand how a country that considers itself a global hero can act this way towards a human being.”
Carlos Tellez Sanchez. “It’s a very difficult situation, one that I don’t wish on anybody.”
His brother in Dallas, Juan Tellez, said no one had given him any explanation of why his brother was sent to Liberia.
Nobody would tell the families where they were
In the week after the flight, families in the United States began telephoning a lawyer in Monrovia, Samwar Fallah, asking him to find their relatives. He is acting for them without charge, alongside two United States immigration lawyers. He knew the aircraft had landed and that the group had been driven away by officials. He did not know where they had been taken, whether they were free to leave, or what status they now held.
Samwar Fallah, lawyer, Monrovia. “You cannot relocate a citizen from one country to another without clear information as to why that person has been relocated. Imagine you coming from maybe El Salvador and then you find out you are on a plane to Liberia.”
Al Jazeera records that Fallah will not call the people sent to Liberia deportees, because the Liberian government has not defined their status under its own law. The Coalition declines the same word for a different reason, which is set out on the terminology page. A lawyer in the receiving state has arrived at the same place from the other end.
What the two governments say
The Department of Homeland Security told CBS News that Tellez Sanchez had been removed once before after crossing the southern border in 2021, that he was released under the previous administration until his arrest at a check-in appointment on 19 December, and that he refused, in its words, “several opportunities to be removed to Mexico”. It said he was “removed to a safe third country on August 19”. It did not dispute that he has no criminal record. Its position, in full:
Department of Homeland Security. “If an illegal alien chooses to file a claim in court refusing to go to their home country, we are required by law to find a safe and secure nation for them to go to. If an illegal alien chooses to go home, we will give them a free flight home and a $3,000 check. The choice is theirs.”
Department of Homeland Security, in a later statement. “The Trump Administration is utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised.”
The State Department has repeatedly declined to give any detail of the arrangements, saying it has “no comment on the details of our diplomatic communications with other governments”.
Liberia’s Information Minister, Jerolinmek Piah, said those transferred would be received as “guests of the Republic”, were free to leave and could seek asylum, and tied the decision to Liberia’s founding as a settlement for free and formerly enslaved Black people from the United States, and to Liberians who sought protection abroad during fourteen years of civil war.
Jerolinmek Piah, Information Minister. “Liberia’s gesture is entirely humanitarian and in keeping with the country’s longstanding traditions.”
Guest is not a status. As Al Jazeera puts it, the word “does not establish a legal status under Liberian law”, and it remains unclear whether the people entered on temporary permits, whether they may work, or whether they must apply for asylum or residency. The Justice Minister, Natu Oswald Tweh, said Liberia reviews each passenger list and may reject anyone, and that “most of them are people who had immigration violations and offences”. The government has not published its screening criteria, and has not said whether any of those who arrived held American orders protecting them from return to their own countries.
Who is paying, and who is providing
Minister Piah said Liberia would bear no cost, and that accommodation, food and eventual onward travel would be met by the United States government and an international partner organisation. In August the government would not name that organisation, or disclose where the group was housed, or the documents under which they entered. On 15 September CBS News reported that the International Organization for Migration has been providing the group with basic necessities.
The Coalition’s Resources page already records what that organisation has published about this practice in its own words, including that it does not negotiate or endorse the agreements, that it plays no role in the transfer itself, and that it will not provide assistance where doing so would risk contributing to refoulement. Both records stand. The Coalition sets them down beside each other and draws no conclusion from them.
What Liberians were told, and when
The Liberian government announced the arrangement two days before the aircraft landed. It says the arrangement rests on diplomatic notes exchanged on 4 and 10 September of last year. Third Country Deportation Watch, a project of Refugees International and Human Rights First, found that the text had appeared on the United States State Department website in March. Most Liberians heard of it in August.
Senator Samuel Kogar of Nimba County put the question of authority directly, citing Article 57 of Liberia’s constitution, which gives the President power to conduct foreign affairs and to conclude treaties, conventions and similar agreements with the concurrence of a majority of each House of the Legislature.
Senator Samuel Kogar. “Was this arrangement brought before both Houses of the Legislature and approved by the required majority? If not, then under what legal authority was this agreement made?”
Representative Anthony F Williams. “No agreement that borders on the national security of this country, the sovereignty of the country, can just be entered into by the executive branch alone.”
Senator Samuel Kogar. “This is not a small issue. We are talking about our sovereignty, our laws, our national security, and the responsibility we have to the Liberian people. Where are we, the Liberians?”
The Liberian legislature is in recess until October. Representative Williams said he would seek answers on housing, healthcare, screening, and Liberia’s own authority to detain or remove anyone sent to it. He noted that Liberia has neither the biometric systems nor the trained personnel to document as many as twelve hundred people moving across counties and porous borders, and that people who fled persecution could be traced by the very governments they escaped.
Eddie Jarwolo of NAYMOTE Partners for Democratic Development said no published plan showed how the country would accommodate the arrivals without further straining public services, that civil society had not been consulted, and called for independent monitoring of conditions, spending and legal compliance.
What passed between the two governments
Liberia says it received no payment and no diplomatic reward for accepting the transfers. The Coalition reported on 12 September that The New York Times had described a five million dollar payment. Al Jazeera records the same figure differently, as five million dollars awarded to Liberia this year by the United States for migration management. The two accounts are of one sum described in two ways, and the Coalition records both.
The following is also on the public record, and is set out without asserting a connection, because neither government has established one. On 9 December 2025 the two countries signed a five-year health memorandum worth one hundred and twenty-four million dollars. The United States extended visitor visas for Liberians from twelve months to thirty-six. Migrant visas for Liberians were halted in January. Al Jazeera has previously reported that those measures followed Liberia’s agreement to accept Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose removal to a prison in El Salvador the United States government has acknowledged was a mistake, and whom it has since sought a court’s permission to send to Liberia. A federal judge in Maryland has blocked that for now.
Eddie Jarwolo, NAYMOTE Partners for Democratic Development. “If they were linked, it would raise serious concerns about Liberia’s negotiating position, national sovereignty and public safety. Development assistance should not require Liberia to accept individuals whose backgrounds and legal status have not been transparently disclosed and properly assessed.”
The arrangement
Liberia has agreed to receive up to twelve hundred people over twelve months who are removed from the United States and are not Liberian nationals. One flight has arrived. Liberia is not holding the group: unlike Eswatini, which detains those it receives, the people at Marshall have been told not to go far from the building for their own safety but are free to leave it. None of those interviewed said they wished to stay, citing poverty, a culture they do not know, and having no permission to work. More than thirty states have now agreed to receive people removed from the United States who are not their nationals.
Sources
Every passage in quotation marks above is reproduced word for word from one of the four reports below. The Coalition has added no facts of its own.
- Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Liberia receives first group of “third country” deportees from U.S., officials say, CBS News, 20 August 2026.
- Lennart Dodoo, ‘Not a small issue’: People deported by US to Liberia face uncertain future, Al Jazeera, 22 August 2026, reported from Monrovia.
- Camilo Montoya-Galvez, ICE deports Venezuelan father from Texas to West Africa: A situation “I don’t wish on anybody”, CBS News, 29 August 2026.
- Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Latin American migrants deported by ICE to West Africa describe being stranded “on the other side of the world”, CBS News, 15 September 2026, reported from Monrovia, with Haitham Moussa, Jane Greeley and Sam Brolan.
Liberia carries an Alert on this site, as do Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Cameroon, Guatemala, Honduras, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Venezuela is listed among the countries people hold protection against. If someone in your family was on this flight, the route for finding a person and the legal aid index are on the Resources page. The Coalition records what courts, United Nations bodies and identified news organisations have found. It does not advise on any individual case.