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.

Updated 26 October 2026. After the full 60 Minutes broadcast: added the department’s answers when CBS put its evidence to it, further detail on Moussa Diawara from the CBS transcript, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report’s figure on returns, and what the First Circuit said in September 2026, which the Supreme Court is now reviewing.

The United States calls it third-country removal. In the Coalition’s view, the record shows what it has become: a way of returning people to the countries its own immigration judges ordered they must not be sent to, because they would be persecuted or tortured there. The United States flies a protected person to a third country, usually in Africa. In the documented cases, that country held them under guard, in conditions where malaria and disease are reported, until they agreed to go home or were put on a flight home. In the documented cases the court order was never set aside. It was simply defeated. In law, that is refoulement: indirect refoulement where the third country sends the person on, constructive refoulement where it pressures them into “choosing” to go. Both are prohibited by international law and, in the Coalition’s reading, by United States law.

On 25 October 2026 CBS News’ 60 Minutes put the scheme in front of a national audience. What it found matches what courts, sworn declarations, United Nations bodies and other news organisations have recorded for more than a year. CBS reports that about 25,000 of the people deported in the first year and a half of President Trump’s second term were sent to third countries rather than home. The record shows the United States was told, repeatedly and from April 2025 onward, that protected people among them were being sent on, and the transfers have continued.

A judge said not Mali. His bag tags said Mali.

In 2012 a United States immigration judge ruled that Moussa Diawara could be deported, but not to Mali, where the judge found he would likely be persecuted. On 11 July 2026 immigration agents arrested him outside his home near Houston. On 31 July he landed in Ghana, a country he had never been to. He says he and others were held in a hotel by armed guards and not allowed to make telephone calls, and that within five days Ghanaian officials forced him onto a flight to Mali.

According to CBS, Mr Diawara had lived in the United States for 25 years with no criminal record. He was finishing a night shift as an Uber driver when he was arrested at the home he owns with his wife and children, who are U.S. citizens. He was held in ICE detention in Texas for three weeks, without being able to speak to his lawyer or a judge, before the flight. In Mali he was left with no money or identification; CBS first reached him there in August, homeless and in hiding, and showed the bench he said had been his bed for two weeks. Part of his fear, he told CBS, is that he converted to Christianity, in a Muslim-majority country with an Islamist insurgency. After three weeks, with the help of local truck drivers, he escaped to another African country, which CBS did not name at his request.

Both of the bag tags the Department of Homeland Security issued him named his destination as Mali. So did a medical document which, he says, United States officials handed him on the flight to Ghana; CBS reports that it read “SHRC Mali”, SHRC standing for Special High Risk Charter. The department told CBS the tags were “produced by contractors” who “are not part of the process that determines…the destination,” and that the form was a “clerical error.” It has not said who supplied the destination, if not the United States.

Seventeen of nineteen say they were sent back

CBS obtained the names of all 63 people on Mr Diawara’s flight, which left Texas on 30 July 2026 and stopped in Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic and Ghana. It tracked down those sent to Ghana. In the programme’s words:

“Seventeen of the 19 people we reached who were sent to Ghana told us the same thing: Ghana quickly transported them, against their will, to countries that U.S. immigration judges had ruled they should not be returned to.”

Among those countries CBS names Niger, Mali, Nigeria, Gambia and Guinea. Of the 63 on the flight, CBS found that 62 per cent had no criminal record at all, 19 per cent had a traffic violation and 19 per cent a criminal charge or conviction. Protection under the Convention against Torture does not depend on a clean record: it bars return to torture whatever a person has done.

The same pattern appears in each of the other records that trace what happened to people after they landed:

• Ghana, the count so far. In January 2026 Reuters reported that of the more than 30 West Africans the United States had sent to Ghana in 2025, at least 22 were sent by Ghana to their home countries despite having obtained court-ordered protection, by its tally from lawyers’ interviews and court filings. Ghana’s presidential spokesperson told a news conference that month: As and when they come, they are processed and sent to their countries of origin. (Reuters, 16 January 2026, syndicated copy)
• Ghana, September 2025. According to a lawyer’s sworn declaration filed in federal court, after nearly two weeks in a military camp Ghana forced ten of the eleven people held there across the border into Togo, on 18 and 19 September. Two were Togolese women who had been granted withholding of removal as to Togo after fleeing female genital mutilation: for them, Togo was the barred country itself. The declaration states that a Malian woman was then kidnapped and sexually assaulted in Togo. Another man, protected under the Convention against Torture, had already been sent from the airport to the Gambia.
• Ghana to Sierra Leone, November 2025. Rabbiatu Kuyateh, a nurse from Maryland, held withholding of removal as to Sierra Leone. According to her lawyer’s sworn declaration, which identifies her by her initials, she was flown to Ghana on 5 November and on 11 November was forcibly taken from her hotel, held overnight at the airport and flown to Sierra Leone. NBC4 Washington published video of her being dragged away, and an eyewitness confirmed to 60 Minutes that the people pulling her are Ghanaian officials.
• Equatorial Guinea, 2026. United Nations special procedures, in a communication to the government, recorded that at least 29 people, all holding protection from a United States immigration judge, had been transferred there, and that several fueron devueltas por la fuerza a sus países de origen o enviadas a otros países: they were forcibly returned to their countries of origin or sent to other countries. The experts wrote that these measures contravene the principle of non-refoulement. The lawyer Meredyth Yoon told the Arizona Daily Star in August 2026 that at least 17 of the 40 people held at a hotel in Malabo had already been wrongly deported to their home countries.
• Mexico to Guatemala, 2025. A court finding. O.C.G. had withholding of removal as to Guatemala. The United States bussed him to Mexico, which then sent him back to Guatemala, where, a federal court found on 23 May 2025, he remains in hiding. He was later returned to the United States on the court’s order.
• Nicaragua and Venezuela, October 2025. An Iranian man granted withholding of removal as to Iran states in a sworn declaration that on 16 October 2025 ICE deported him to Nicaragua, that Nicaraguan officers deported him to Venezuela, that Venezuelan authorities put him on a plane to Tehran, and that he escaped during the transit in Istanbul.

These declarations were made under penalty of perjury. The Massachusetts court did not rule on them either way: in its judgment of 25 February 2026 it set the newly filed exhibits aside to avoid prejudice to the government, without questioning their content.

The Coalition’s list of States Engaging in Refoulement now records thirteen third countries that have sent people transferred from the United States on towards the countries they fled.

The United States said where they were going

The strongest evidence that the third country is a pretext comes from the officials who carried out the transfers, and from the court that heard the first Ghana case.

• On the plane to Ghana. A Nigerian man who held withholding of removal swore that when he told officers on the flight that he feared for his life, an officer told me that he didn’t care, and that when we got to Ghana we would then go to our respective countries of origin (D.A. v. Noem, declaration, ECF 21-1, paragraph 14). The complaint in that case alleges that on arrival a U.S. official told Ghanaian officials that each individual on the plane would be transported to their country of origin.
• In Nicaragua. The Iranian man states, under penalty of perjury, in his declaration that a Nicaraguan officer told him the Nicaraguan government had already agreed with the U.S. government that I would be sent to Nicaragua so that Nicaragua could send me back to Iran.
• In the government’s own lawyer’s words, 12 September 2025. Government counsel told Judge Tanya Chutkan that Ghana had assured the United States it was not going to torture them, and … would not take them to a country where they would be tortured. Asked whether Ghana appeared to be violating those assurances, counsel answered: based on the plaintiffs’ allegations it seems that is correct (hearing transcript, as quoted in D.A. v. Noem, ECF 41, pp. 9–10).
• Under oath, 13 September 2025. A senior State Department official swore that the United States had received Ghana’s assurances by diplomatic note and that, beyond them, he was not aware that the Department of State, including through the U.S. Embassy in Ghana, has made any additional efforts to keep Plaintiffs from being removed from Ghana to their country of origin or other countries where they fear persecution or torture (D.A. v. Noem, declaration of Jonathan G. Pratt, ECF 50, paragraph 5). Five days later, according to the sworn declaration filed in Massachusetts, Ghana began forcing the plaintiffs and others across the border into Togo.
• In federal court, 15 September 2025. Judge Chutkan wrote that the United States had sent the plaintiffs to Ghana with no notice or opportunity to challenge that removal, under what appears to be a hasty and unwritten agreement with Ghana, which has indicated its intention to return Plaintiffs to their home countries where Defendants agree they will almost certainly be persecuted (D.A. v. Noem, ECF 41, p. 4). She denied relief on jurisdictional grounds. The flights to Ghana continued.

The receiving governments say the same thing in their own words:

• Sierra Leone tells arrivals, in a pamphlet shown to 60 Minutes, that it is serving as a temporary transit location while arrangements are made to return you to your country of origin.
• Jamaica, which received its first flight on 13 October 2026, says in its government’s own statement that this is a transit arrangement intended to facilitate the return of Third Country Nationals to their countries of origin or other receiving countries.
• Guatemala’s president said people sent through it are taken on en menos de 24 horas: No hay ninguna permanencia, no hay ningún refugio, there is no stay and no refuge.
• The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s government said the departures confirmed le caractère strictement transitoire, temporaire et limité dans le temps de ce mécanisme, the strictly transitional, temporary and time-limited nature of the arrangement.
• Paraguay’s migration director said earlier arrivals regresaron a sus países, went back to their countries, after five to fifteen days.

For a person with no protection, transit home may be lawful. For a person a judge has protected, transit home is the very thing the order forbids.

DHS confronted with the evidence

CBS put its findings to James Percival, whom it describes as the Department of Homeland Security’s top lawyer. His answers, from the published transcript, are the department’s position on the record:

• Whether Ghana had sent protected people home against their will. I’m not aware of any such cases.
• Whether the people were going back voluntarily. Either they would choose to go home, and they might not always be truthful about the fact that they consented, so that’s one possibility. The other possibility is that the foreign government applied their own procedures and, consistent with international law, determined that it was acceptable to return them home. He did not say that sending a protected person home would be wrong.
• The video of Rabbiatu Kuyateh being dragged to her flight. I have not seen that video.
• Mr Diawara’s bag tags reading “Destination: Mali”. Well, he wasn’t flown to Mali. He was– he was flown to Ghana, so I– but I can’t speak to why that piece of paper says that–
• Whether the United States coordinated the return, or at least knew of it. I was– I was not aware of that. That is not my understanding of how this works. Then: It seems like you’re very focused on Ghana. Do you want to talk about any of the other countries? The department’s explanation of the tags and the medical form, contractors and a “clerical error”, came in a written statement after the interview.
• The Sierra Leone pamphlet announcing return to the country of origin. Again, they are entitled to return to their home country if they consent. They are also entitled– to process the fear claim, as we discussed.
• What share of the people deported are violent offenders. So I don’t have that figure off the top of my head. Asked whether the policy reaches nurses, mothers and Uber drivers, he said the administration is following the law that Congress has passed and that many in this population committed very serious crimes.

Which laws Congress passed. Mr Percival said the administration is following the law Congress has passed. Congress also passed the law against sending a person to torture: it made it the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country where they would be in danger of torture (FARRA, section 2242(a)), and it provided that the government may not remove an alien to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened (8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(A)). The department is bound by those laws as much as by the laws it cites. In the Coalition’s view, it enforces the one set and works around the other, and the speed of the process is the clearest sign of it. Under the July 2025 guidance, as reported, a person is told of removal to a third country ordinarily twenty-four hours ahead, and in exigent circumstances six (see the overview); Mr Diawara spent three weeks in ICE detention without being able to speak to his lawyer or a judge. A few more days to reach a lawyer would cost the government almost nothing. Denying them to people it already knows hold protection orders means the protection Congress enacted is never tested before the person is gone. The Coalition regards that as enforcement in bad faith. A criminal record does not change this. Congress directed that people with serious convictions be excluded from torture protection only to the maximum extent consistent with the obligations of the United States under the Convention (FARRA, section 2242(c)), and the Convention’s ban has no exceptions. So the regulations Congress required provide that a person barred from withholding by a conviction shall be granted deferral of removal to the country where he or she is more likely than not to be tortured (8 C.F.R. § 208.17(a)). The Supreme Court has confirmed that such a person is entitled to CAT relief and may not be removed to that country (Nasrallah v. Barr, 2020). Congress enacted no rule that a conviction cancels that protection. Pointing to criminal records to justify a process that sends protected people on to the very countries they are protected from applies a blanket rule Congress never passed.

These answers are not an admission that the department knowingly arranged returns. They record its position when shown specific evidence, and they leave open questions only its own records can answer: who entered “Mali” on Mr Diawara’s paperwork, what Ghana promised and when, and what the department did after it was warned about Ghana.

A wider figure points the same way. In February 2026 the Democratic minority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported that [a]s of January 2026, more than eighty percent of the migrants sent to third countries paid by the United States to take them in have already returned to their country of origin or are in the process of doing so (At What Cost? Inside the Trump Administration’s Secret Deportation Deals, p. 5). That figure covers everyone sent to those countries, not only people holding protection orders, and the report presents it as evidence of wasted money. It shows that, for most people sent to these countries, the third country was a stop on the way home. The First Circuit quoted it in September 2026 when explaining what chain refoulement is.

Held under guard until they go

Where people are not put straight onto a flight, the conditions do the work.

• Ghana. According to the complaint in D.A. v. Noem, four of the first fourteen were kept in straitjackets for about sixteen hours on the flight. A sworn declaration filed in Massachusetts records that before the November flight left the United States, a man with withholding of removal as to the Gambia and a heart condition, who protested that Ghana had been sending people back to their countries of origin, was tackled by ICE officers, lost consciousness and was put in a straitjacket. The same declaration records that the November group was held in a guarded hotel and told by Ghanaian immigration officers that they would all be sent back to their countries of origin. The first group was held at the Bundase military training camp, which detainees called Dema Camp; one wrote that Conditions are horrible at Dema Camp. Since the morning of September 12, there has been no reliable power, Internet, or running water. The Global Detention Project reported that at least one detainee had contracted malaria, and that detainees were exposed to heat, mosquitoes and unsanitary water. In These Times reported that a woman sent to Ghana attempted to take her life in custody and was taken to hospital. The United Nations Committee on Migrant Workers said on 12 June 2026 that the reception, detention and onward transfer of these individuals may have exposed them to direct, indirect or chain refoulement (CMW/C/GHA/CO/2, paragraph 48).
• Equatorial Guinea. In an order of 6 October 2026, which the Coalition has read, a federal judge in Arizona found it unrebutted that an Egyptian man protected against return to Egypt has since been held under armed guard; threatened at gunpoint; and arrested, beaten, and held incommunicado by Equatorial Guinean authorities, and that his removal violated the Due Process Clause (A.M.A.S. v. Mullin, No. 2:26-cv-06601 (D. Ariz.), Doc. 14, quoted from the order itself; also reported by NPR). A complaint filed before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in June 2026 alleges cases of malaria and typhoid, delayed or denied medical care, and inadequate hygiene facilities. In July 2026 a coalition of lawyers’ organisations reported, citing detainees, that a person with a suspected case of Ebola had been brought under quarantine into the same hotel complex. UN experts recorded in their April 2026 communication that Las autoridades están presionando a las nueve personas restantes para que acepten ser deportadas a terceros países sin ninguna garantía sobre su protección o su situación una vez en dichos países: the authorities were pressing the nine who remained to accept deportation elsewhere with no guarantee of protection.
• Elsewhere, the same conditions. These groups are not recorded as holding protection orders, but they show what the arrangements look like. People sent to South Sudan, who ICE swore held no protection order, were reported by Third Country Deportation Watch to be held in a guarded complex in Juba with too little electricity and plagued with mosquitoes. Human Rights Watch reports that people transferred to Cameroon told a lawyer they felt pressured to return to their countries of origin, and that people held in Panama were not allowed to call lawyers or family unless they accepted assistance from the International Organization for Migration to repatriate.

Whether a particular return was voluntary depends on the facts of each case: the person’s risk, what they were told, and what pressure the state applied. Where people are held under guard, without lawyers, and told they will be sent home, the Coalition considers that a return obtained this way is not voluntary. It is constructive refoulement, the conduct the Committee against Torture forbids when it tells states not to use dissuasive measures or policies which would compel persons in need of protection under article 3 of the Convention to return to their country of origin in spite of their personal risk of being subjected to torture (General Comment No. 4, paragraph 14). United States law shows the same concern at home. When a person granted deferral of removal under the Convention against Torture asks to give it up, an immigration judge must be satisfied that the request is knowing and voluntary (8 C.F.R. § 208.17(e)). The regulation also allows deferral to end in other ways, on the government’s motion or on diplomatic assurances, and it does not govern what happens in another country. The Coalition draws on it as an analogy: in a camp in Ghana or a hotel in Malabo, no judge asks whether a decision to go home was freely made.

What the United States knew, and when

• 18 April 2025. A federal court in Massachusetts, in a preliminary ruling later stayed by the Supreme Court, said that blanket assurances offer no protection against either torture by non-state actors or chain refoulement, whereby the third country proceeds to return an individual to his country of origin (D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security, Doc. 64, p. 43).
• 16 and 23 May 2025. The government told the court of an “error” in its earlier sworn account of O.C.G.’s case, and the court found that Mexico had sent him back to Guatemala.
• 12 to 15 September 2025. Government counsel acknowledged that Ghana appeared to be breaching its assurances; a State Department official swore he knew of no further efforts to stop onward removal; Judge Chutkan wrote that Ghana had indicated its intention to return the plaintiffs home. On 15 September Ghana’s communications minister said the first group had all left for their home countries.
• 8 December 2025. Sworn declarations describing people sent on by Ghana, and the Iranian man’s account, were filed in the Massachusetts case (Doc. 233-7, 233-8, 233-18).
• 16 January 2026. Reuters reported at least 22 people with court-ordered protection sent home by Ghana.
• February 2026. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority reported that more than 80 per cent of the people sent to third countries the United States paid had returned, or were returning, to their countries of origin.
• 25 February 2026. The Massachusetts court, setting the policy aside, wrote that nobody really knows anything about these purported ‘assurances.’ Whom do they cover? What do they cover? Why has the Government deemed them credible? How can anyone even know for certain that they exist?
• 23 April 2026. UN experts wrote to Equatorial Guinea about people forcibly returned, and wrote again on 15 June.
• 12 June 2026. The UN Committee on Migrant Workers raised chain refoulement through Ghana.
• 30 and 31 July 2026. The United States sent another flight to Ghana. Seventeen of the 19 people CBS reached say they were sent on against their will. According to the immigration lawyer Meredyth Yoon, speaking to 60 Minutes, the United States had been warned about Ghana in a lawsuit the year before; after that warning, CBS reports, ten more flights to Ghana followed. The counts differ: Third Country Deportation Watch records nine flights to Ghana in all, from 5 September 2025 to 31 July 2026. CBS lists 63 people on the July flight, and an earlier account in The American Prospect described about seventy-one. These counts come from different sources and have not been reconciled.
• 28 September 2026. United Nations experts made public a communication to the United States and to the governments of 35 countries and territories: The harms caused by this US Government scheme are no longer hypothetical, warning of a cascade of human rights violations (as reported by Reuters).

The written assurance is now public. In its note of 1 August 2025, Ghana promised the United States that people transferred would not be persecuted or tortured in Ghana or in any country to which the Government of Ghana may further transfer them. The record shows Ghana sending people on to the very countries that promise was meant to protect them from, and the United States continuing to send people to Ghana. Most assurances remain secret. In September 2026 the First Circuit noted that neither the public record nor the record in this case discloses what countries, if any, have provided the State Department with the diplomatic assurances contemplated by the Guidance (D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security, No. 26-1212, n.15); that decision is now under review by the Supreme Court.

Through these events, by its own courts, by its own lawyer’s acknowledgement in court, and by public reporting and United Nations bodies, the United States was put on notice that people it sent to these countries were being returned to the countries its judges had barred. The transfers continued. The record does not contain an internal directive to return protected people home, and it does not show the purpose behind every arrangement. But continued transfers in the face of that knowledge support a strong inference, and the Coalition draws it: in the cases documented here, the agreements did not work as a safeguard that failed. They worked as the mechanism. Third-country removal, as carried out against people holding protection orders, is a way of doing indirectly what United States judges have forbidden the government to do directly, and of doing it with deniability: the last flight is another country’s.

What it violates

United States law.

• The withholding statute. Congress provided that the government may not remove an alien to a country if the Attorney General decides that the alien’s life or freedom would be threatened in that country (8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(A)). For most people in this record that decision has been made; the others hold protection under the Convention against Torture, which the next statute covers. A removal arranged so that the person ends up in that country, through an intermediary the government knows will send them there, defeats the decision as surely as a direct flight.
• The torture statute. Congress declared it the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States (Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, section 2242(a), note to 8 U.S.C. § 1231). Otherwise effect the involuntary return describes a result, not a route. In the Coalition’s reading it reaches a return effected through a second country; no court has yet decided the point.
• The immigration judges’ orders. A withholding or deferral order is a binding decision of the Department of Justice’s own judges. The executive branch is circumventing them without asking any judge to revisit them.
• Due process. Federal courts have already ordered the government to bring people back on due-process grounds: O.C.G. from Guatemala and the Egyptian man from Equatorial Guinea. A federal court in Colorado has also ordered the government to bring back a Honduran man sent to the Central African Republic.

International law.

• The Convention against Torture, article 3, forbids sending a person to a state where there are substantial grounds for believing they would be in danger of torture, without exception. The Committee against Torture has said a person at risk should never be deported to another State from which the person may subsequently face deportation to a third State in which there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture (General Comment No. 4, paragraph 12), and in 2024 found that Sweden would violate article 3 by removing a man to Kosovo, where he would face a real risk of being forcibly transferred to and subjected to torture in Türkiye (M.T. v. Sweden, CAT/C/81/D/1109/2021, 8 November 2024). As the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards, put it in July 2026: You cannot outsource your way around the torture ban. (OHCHR; reproduced here)
• The Refugee Convention, article 33, forbids returning a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where their life or freedom would be threatened (text). It binds the United States through the 1967 Protocol, and Ghana through both the Convention and the Protocol. “In any manner whatsoever” includes through a third country. Ghana is also a party to the 1969 African refugee convention.
• The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as the Human Rights Committee reads it, forbids removal where there are substantial grounds for believing that there is a real risk of irreparable harm, such as that contemplated by articles 6 and 7 of the Covenant, either in the country to which removal is to be effected or in any country to which the person may subsequently be removed (General Comment No. 31, paragraph 12).
• Responsibility for helping. Under the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility, a state that aids or assists another state’s wrongful act is itself responsible if (a) that State does so with knowledge of the circumstances of the internationally wrongful act; and (b) the act would be internationally wrongful if committed by that State (article 16). The International Law Commission’s commentary adds further limits, which are themselves debated: the help must be given with a view to facilitating the commission of that act, and must actually do so (commentary to article 16), and knowledge of earlier removals does not by itself prove every element. In the Coalition’s view, the two written conditions are met. The United States knows what Ghana and the others do with the people it delivers, and returning those people home itself would breach its own obligations under article 3 of the Convention against Torture and article 33 of the Refugee Convention; its judges’ findings of likely persecution or torture are the evidence of that risk. Delivering the person is the indispensable step, and continuing to deliver people after being told what follows is, in the Coalition’s view, the strongest available evidence of the required purpose. Whether a tribunal would agree is undecided.

Who is responsible. Three questions are distinct, and each has its own elements. First, whether a receiving state that sent a protected person on breached its own obligations. Second, whether the United States, by sending people to that state knowing what it does, aided or assisted that breach. Third, whether the United States’ own transfer breached its obligations directly, because the duty not to return a person to torture or persecution covers a return carried out through another state. The Coalition is not aware of any court that has yet decided these questions for these transfers, and the answers depend on the facts of each case. In the Coalition’s view the evidence points to yes on all three for the people documented here, and none of the states involved can shelter behind the others. The people returned are those whom a judge has already found likely to be persecuted or, in the Convention cases, tortured. Once people are returned, many can no longer be reached, which is why the risk a judge has found must be respected before removal rather than tested after it.

What the government says, and what is still contested

• The government’s position. The department says it obtains diplomatic assurances, questions the credibility of fear claims (including Mr Diawara’s), says people may choose to go home and that receiving states apply their own procedures, and says third-country removals have stopped crimes from happening and kept Americans safer. It told NPR that in the Egyptian man’s case the end result will be the same: he will not remain in the United States. CBS reports that Mr Diawara’s 2012 ruling said the United States could find a safe alternative if it ever wanted to remove him. Ghana’s foreign minister said in September 2025 that people sent there could remain temporarily under regional visa-free rules or return home. Ghana declined to comment to CBS.
• The legal arguments against. A federal regulation says nothing in the withholding and deferral rules prevents removal to a third country other than the country to which removal has been withheld or deferred (8 C.F.R. § 208.16(f)). The government reads protection as limited to the named country. International obligations are not the same as rights a person can enforce in a United States court: the Convention against Torture is not self-executing, FARRA states a policy and limits judicial review, and the United States has told the Human Rights Committee that the Covenant did not contain any non-refoulement prohibition. In Sale v. Haitian Centers Council (1993) the Supreme Court held that article 33 did not apply to the Coast Guard’s interception of Haitians on the high seas and their return to Haiti. The Coalition distinguishes it: the removals in this record are ordered and begun from United States territory, of people already within it. No United States court has yet held the government responsible for a receiving state’s onward removal. In the Massachusetts case, the First Circuit on 18 September 2026 affirmed, apart from two declarations, the judgment requiring that people facing removal to a third country be given effective notice and a meaningful opportunity to raise a fear of persecution or torture there. A right not to be sent where one is likely to be tortured, the court wrote, means little if one is not given prior notice of an intended third-country removal to that country and a meaningful opportunity to assert their fear of torture if removed to that location. That ruling concerned procedure, not responsibility for onward removals, and it is not final: the Supreme Court stayed it on 29 September 2026 and will hear argument on 9 December 2026.
• The Coalition’s answer. The regulation permits removal to a third country. It does not permit removal through a third country to the barred one. Nothing in it authorises the government to choose an intermediary it knows will complete the forbidden return.
• Where the evidence comes from, and who holds the rest. The accounts in this record were given under penalty of perjury in federal court, or to journalists who checked them. They are corroborated by video, by eyewitnesses, by the government’s own paperwork naming the barred country, by a Reuters tally, and by the receiving governments’ own statements that people are sent home. The department has disputed parts of this evidence, questioning Mr Diawara’s credibility and attributing the “Mali” paperwork to contractors and a clerical error, but it has produced no records to answer it. Its top lawyer said only that he was not aware of such cases. The agreements, most of the assurances and the passenger manifests with their destination codes are held by the governments, and almost none has been published. Where the facts lie wholly with the authorities, international courts have allowed adverse inferences to be drawn from a state’s failure to produce them. The governments can end any doubt by publishing them. See the Coalition’s Refoulement page.

Sources

• CBS News, 60 Minutes, “Destination: Nowhere”, reported by Gianna Toboni, broadcast 25 October 2026: the investigation (13:10) · the full episode (43:19)
• CBS News, 60 Minutes transcript, “How some deportees end up in countries U.S. judges ruled off limits”, 25 October 2026. CBS News
• CBS News, “Texas dad deported by ICE to Ghana was then forced to go to Mali, a country that’s unsafe for him, he says”, 25 October 2026. CBS News
• D.A. v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-03135 (D.D.C.): complaint, ECF 1; declaration of D.A., ECF 21-1; memorandum opinion of 15 September 2025, ECF 41; declaration of Jonathan G. Pratt, executed 13 September 2025, ECF 50.
• D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:25-cv-10676 (D. Mass.): preliminary injunction, 18 April 2025, Doc. 64; notice of errata, 16 May 2025, Doc. 103; order on O.C.G., 23 May 2025, Doc. 132; declaration of Ana Dionne-Lanier on M.M., first filed 14 November 2025 as Doc. 227-5, withdrawn with the other Doc. 227 declarations on 18 November (Doc. 228) and refiled on 8 December 2025 as Doc. 233-11; declarations of Patrick Taurel, Hannah Bridges and an Iranian national, filed 8 December 2025, Doc. 233-7, 233-8, 233-18; memorandum and order, 25 February 2026, Doc. 241.
• D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security, No. 26-1212 (1st Cir. 18 September 2026). Opinion. Under review by the Supreme Court.
• U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Minority Staff Report, At What Cost? Inside the Trump Administration’s Secret Deportation Deals, February 2026. Senate Foreign Relations Committee
• Supreme Court dockets: 24A1153, 26A406, 26-426.
• A.M.A.S. v. Mullin, No. 2:26-cv-06601 (D. Ariz.), order of 6 October 2026. CourtListener. Sanchez Servellon v. Baltazar (D. Colo.), order of 18 September 2026. CourtListener
• Reuters, “Ghana took in Trump’s deported West Africans, then it forced them home”, 16 January 2026. Reuters · syndicated copy read
• Government of Ghana, diplomatic note to the United States, 1 August 2025. Berkeley Human Rights Center, Reading Room
• Associated Press, “Immigrants deported from U.S. to Ghana are sent home, where lawyers say some could face torture”, 15 September 2025. PBS NewsHour. AFP, Ghana foreign minister’s remarks, September 2025. Daily Trust
• Global Detention Project, “Ghana: Detention and Secret Expulsions Raise Alarm over Role in U.S. Deportation Scheme”, 21 October 2025. Global Detention Project. In These Times, November 2025. In These Times. NBC4 Washington, 20 November 2025. NBC4. Third Country Deportation Watch: Ghana, South Sudan.
• UN Committee on Migrant Workers, concluding observations on Ghana, CMW/C/GHA/CO/2, paragraph 48, 12 June 2026. UN
• UN special procedures, communications to Equatorial Guinea, UA GNQ 1/2026 (23 April 2026) and UA GNQ 2/2026 (15 June 2026). GNQ 1/2026 · GNQ 2/2026
• Arizona Daily Star, “U.S. deportees assaulted, threatened at gunpoint in Equatorial Guinea, three say”, 8 August 2026. Arizona Daily Star. Advancing Justice-Atlanta, African Commission complaint, June 2026. Advancing Justice-Atlanta. IHRDA, 9 July 2026. IHRDA. NPR, 9 October 2026. NPR
• Receiving governments: Jamaica Information Service, 13 October 2026, JIS; Guatemala, AGN; Democratic Republic of the Congo, ACP; Paraguay, Primicias/EFE.
• Human Rights Watch: Cameroon, 20 February 2026, HRW; Panama, 24 April 2025, HRW.
• Reuters, “UN experts call for halt to Trump policy of migrant deportations to third countries”, 28 September 2026. The Star. The experts’ own press release could not be loaded when this page was checked.
• The American Prospect, 31 August 2026. The American Prospect
• United States law: Nasrallah v. Barr, 590 U.S. 573 (2020); 8 U.S.C. § 1231 and FARRA § 2242 (note); 8 C.F.R. § 208.16; 8 C.F.R. § 208.17; Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, 509 U.S. 155 (1993).
• International law: Refugee Convention (1951); OAU Refugee Convention (1969), ratification list; CAT General Comment No. 4; M.T. v. Sweden; Human Rights Committee General Comment No. 31; United States comments, CCPR/C/USA/CO/3/Rev.1/Add.1; ILC Articles on State Responsibility.
• The Coalition’s earlier reports, each with its own sources: Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, South Sudan, States Engaging in Refoulement, O.C.G., Rabbiatu Kuyateh, the Ghana declaration, the Special Rapporteur, what US courts have held, the Supreme Court stay.