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.
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.
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.
The Rules Say the Country Must Be Named. Two Courts Said So in 1998 and 1999.
Two provisions of the removal regulations require the immigration judge to identify the alternative countries on the record, and to tell a person who fears one of them that he may apply for protection against being sent there. Courts of appeals said the same in 1998 and 1999. In O.C.G.'s hearing no alternative country was identified, and when he raised Mexico himself he was told it could not happen.
A Man With Protection From Guatemala Was Put on a Bus to Mexico. Mexico Sent Him Back to Guatemala.
An immigration judge found he would more likely than not suffer serious harm in Guatemala. Two days later he was removed to Mexico without notice, and Mexico sent him to Guatemala. A federal judge ordered the government to bring him back, and the court has since recorded that the government did.
She Won Her Case, and Was Deported Anyway: A Maryland Nurse Sent Through Ghana
On September 17, 2025 an immigration judge granted Rabbiatu Kuyateh withholding of removal to Sierra Leone, and both sides waived appeal. Forty-nine days later the United States flew her to Ghana without telling her where she was going, and six days after that Ghanaian officers dragged her out of a hotel and flew her to Sierra Leone.
Ghana Offered a Safe Haven. What the July 31 Flight Met Instead
Ghana's foreign minister said on camera in September 2025 that his country was offering itself as a safe haven to West Africans deported by the United States, and that those who arrived could stay ninety days. Ten months later a flight landed in Accra carrying more than thirty people, every one of whom held a United States finding that they could not safely be returned home. Within a day, some of them were.
Before Ghana, Djibouti: What ICE’s Own Declaration Says About U.S. Third-Country Removals
Four months before the deportation flights to Ghana, a court order stranded eight men on a United States naval base in Djibouti. What conditions were like there is not a matter of allegation. It is set out by the government itself, in a sworn declaration by a senior ICE official, and the Coalition publishes that declaration in full.