News & Reports
Reports and analysis on torture prevention, OPCAT ratifications, UN treaty body sessions, and human rights documentation, sourced from OHCHR, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Coalition monitoring work.
What changed in October 2026
Jamaica received its first group of people from the United States, Sierra Leone a fifth flight, and a federal court ordered a man brought back from Equatorial Guinea. Eswatini and Burundi made statements, ICE told courts that flights to Uganda are paused, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First published new counts, and the Supreme Court set its timetable.
Third-Country Removal Is a Pretext for Refoulement. The United States Is Sending People Its Judges Protected Back to Torture and Persecution Through Transit Countries in Africa and Latin America.
People US immigration judges protected from return are being flown to third countries that send them home or hold them until they go. Courts, sworn declarations, the receiving governments and 60 Minutes document it. The Coalition sets out the record and the law.
He Reported for More Than Twenty Years. A Federal Appeals Court Says ICE Broke Its Own Rules When It Took Him Back.
On 21 October 2026 the Tenth Circuit held that ICE broke its own rules by not promptly interviewing a man it re-detained after more than twenty years on supervision, and that re-detention does not restart the six-month Zadvydas period.
Supreme Court Pauses the Third-Country Ruling and Will Hear the Case on 9 December
On 29 September 2026 the Supreme Court stayed the D.V.D. judgment that had set aside the government’s third-country removal policy, and agreed to decide the case itself. Three Justices would have refused the stay.
What United States Courts Have Held on Removal to a Third Country, and What They Have Not
What United States courts have held on the protection, the power to remove to a third country, diplomatic assurances, detention, notice, jurisdiction and proof, and the questions no court had decided as of 3 September 2026.
Liberia Agreed in September 2025. Liberians Were Told in August 2026.
The agreement under which people are flown from the United States to Liberia was published by the Department of State in March 2026 and announced to Liberians in August. It sets no limit on numbers, provides nothing about lawyers, detention or monitoring, and makes signed operating procedures a condition of any transfer. No such procedures have been produced.
Fourteen People Won Protection in American Courts. Now They Are Before the African Commission.
On 5 June 2026 five organisations filed a complaint against Equatorial Guinea at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, for fourteen people sent there from the United States. Every one of them had been granted protection by an American immigration judge. Three months on, the Commission has announced nothing.
The Plane Landed in Monrovia at 12:45. By Evening It Was in Malabo.
Six people refused to get off a United States removal flight in Liberia, saying it was not their country and that they would face danger there. They were told they would be flown back to the United States. The same aircraft landed that evening in Equatorial Guinea.
She Filed Her Own Habeas Petition From Detention. Two Days After Her Reply Was Docketed, She Was Flown to Liberia.
Paola Ferreira Dos Santos filed her own petition for habeas corpus from immigration detention in Texas in March. A judge ordered the government to state the status of her removal proceedings. Her reply was entered on the docket on 17 August. On 19 August she was flown to Liberia. The petition has never been decided.
Twenty Were Flown to Liberia on 20 August. Five Were Put Back on the Plane.
Roughly twenty people landed at Monrovia on 20 August. Five refused to leave the aircraft and, Reuters reported, were taken on to Equatorial Guinea. Most of the fifteen who remained had already won an order from an American court forbidding their return to their own countries.