One Saturday morning in early September, I got a WhatsApp video call from eleven strangers locked inside a secretive detention camp in a forest in Ghana. Their faces looked glazed with sweat and stricken with fear. In the background, I could hear birdsong and the drone of insects. An armed guard watched over the group as they huddled around a shared cellphone.
“There are big snakes here, and scorpions!” a male voice with an American accent called out.
“My stomach is really hurting, and we have to beg for food,” another man said.
A third added, “We fear we’ll be tortured and killed.”
One of the men, a car salesman and a real-estate agent from Miami, whom I’ll call Jim, gave me a tour of the scene: an open-air military complex known as Bundase Training Camp, some forty miles from Accra. “I have five U.S.-citizen children, and they don’t know where their father is,” Jim said.
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Just months earlier, one of these men had a job with UPS in Chicago. Another had lived in Houston, where he worked for his mother’s catering business, composed R. & B. music, and babysat his little brothers. Some had lived in the U.S. from an early age. Jim, a political refugee, had come to Miami from Liberia in the early nineties, when he was twenty-three, after his parents were murdered for their tribal and political affiliations during the country’s civil war. Others, including a twenty-one-year-old woman who had fled Togo fearing genital mutilation, had arrived in the U.S. recently, seeking asylum.
All of them had been taken from the United States against their will. Nearly all had been granted forms of legal relief that bar the government from deporting them to their home countries. At the heart of the protections they’d received was one of the most basic and sacrosanct concepts in both U.S. and international law: non-refoulement. This principle means that no nation should intentionally deport or expel people to a place where they are likely to face torture, persecution, death, or other grave harms.
The forest detainees had got my number from an Atlanta-based immigration attorney named Meredyth Yoon, who works as a litigation director for a nonprofit called Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “Traditionally, we focus a lot on immigration detention, and we engage in advocacy on issues affecting Asian American and Pacific Islander communities,” she told me. But, in recent months, Yoon has had to repeatedly reimagine her work, racing to help community members whose loved ones were seized in large-scale ICE raids and working to defend lawful immigrants from unlawful deportations. This spring, she’d agreed to represent Jim after learning that he’d been held in an ICE processing center in Folkston, Georgia, for more than two years. Jim had won asylum and become a lawful permanent resident of the U.S in the nineties. But, in 2011, he’d been convicted of bank fraud and, more than a decade later, ICE had initiated removal proceedings against him and detained him.
In late summer, Yoon learned that ICE had moved Jim to its Alexandria Staging Facility, in central Louisiana, from which detainees tend to get deported. Yoon contacted ICE to find out where the agency was planning to send him. ICE never answered her e-mails. At that point, Yoon told me, “more alarm bells started going off.”
Then, on the morning of September 8th, Jim called Yoon in a panic. “I’m in Ghana!” he cried out. Yoon scrambled to gather information on Jim and the other detainees who were being held with him. Four days later, she and her colleagues filed an urgent lawsuit, sketching the life-or-death fears of five of them. The next morning, I received the call from all eleven individuals held in Bundase Training Camp, who asked me to describe their plight. “They didn’t tell us where we were going,” Jim said that morning. “They just kidnapped us overnight and whisked us out.”
For months, I had been trying to document the Trump Administration’s secretive third-country removals. At first, getting access to any information was daunting. Some of the deportees were held in far-off prisons or detention sites; others had gone into hiding. Friends and relatives in the U.S. often felt terrified of speaking out, fearing retaliation. “I don’t know that the piece you’re contemplating is necessarily writable right now,” a leading lawyer on the topic, Anwen Hughes, of the advocacy group Human Rights First, wrote to me in late July.
Initially, I’d focussed on two groups of third-country deportees, known to human-rights lawyers as the South Sudan Eight and the Eswatini Five. The first group, from countries including Myanmar, Mexico, and Laos, had been deported, in early July, to South Sudan, a nation struggling to recover from a civil war. Days later, the second group—five men from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen, all of whom had lived in the U.S. for many years—had been deported to the southern African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. There, they were detained in a maximum-security prison, without clear justification.
These deportees appeared to have been handpicked by the Trump Administration to test a new approach to mass deportation. According to the Department of Homeland Security, all of them had been convicted of serious crimes, including murder. Announcing the flight to Eswatini, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for D.H.S., had called the five deportees “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,” a claim that at least one of the countries disavowed. Arguably the most surprising part of these early removals was also the least understood. It wasn’t just that these men were being sent to nations where they had no ties, and to places that were not safe. It was also that, in many cases, men who had completed their sentences in the U.S. years ago were now being subjected to indefinite detention abroad.
The wider strategy of forced third-country transfers had clear policy roots. On January 20th, the first day of Donald Trump’s second term, Trump issued an executive order called “Securing Our Borders,” which, among other things, declared an intention to expand the use of third-country deportations. On February 18th, D.H.S. issued an internal guidance memo, instructing immigration officers to “review for removal” all cases “on the non-detained docket”—meaning anyone with an immigration case who was not in ICE custody. As part of this review, D.H.S. officials would “determine the viability of removal to a third country”—and, if they found that third-country removal was viable, attempt to detain the person. The first large-scale third-country removals occurred that month and targeted newly arrived asylum seekers. Between February 12th and 15th, the U.S. sent two hundred and ninety-nine people—from countries such as Afghanistan, Cameroon, Somalia, and Iran—to Panama. On February 20th and 25th, the U.S. sent an additional two hundred people, including eighty-one children, to Costa Rica. Soon afterward came third-country-deportation flights to Uzbekistan and El Salvador, where more than two hundred and fifty non-Salvadoran immigrants were detained in the brutal Terrorism Confinement Center, also known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT. Some of the men held at CECOT were transferred there as part of another third-country-removal experiment: the President declared that the U.S. had been “invaded” by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, authorizing the removal of supposed gang members. (In June, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg found that the government had violated the rights of those men by not giving them an opportunity to challenge their deportations.)
In late March, a young, gay Guatemalan asylum seeker, known to the court as O.C.G., filed a class-action lawsuit with several other plaintiffs, challenging the new policy of deporting people to third countries without meaningful notice or a chance to contest their removal. According to the complaint, O.C.G. had fled Guatemala because of “multiple death threats on account of his sexuality.” An immigration judge barred his deportation to Guatemala. The Department of Homeland Security then placed him on a bus with some twenty other men and, without issuing a new removal order, deported the group to Mexico. O.C.G. was not able to protest that he also feared persecution and torture in Mexico, where he’d been held hostage and raped while on his journey to the U.S. The lawsuit, known in the courts as D.V.D. v. D.H.S., became the primary legal battlefront for an urgent question: Can the government deport people to third countries without giving them an opportunity to claim that they could be tortured or killed there?
In April, a Massachusetts federal judge, Brian E. Murphy, issued a preliminary injunction, saying that the government must grant people at least fifteen days to challenge third-country deportations. But two months later the Supreme Court granted a stay, reversing Murphy’s order. (Using the so-called shadow docket, the Court offered no public explanation of its reasoning.) The result is that, for now, D.H.S. can deport people to countries not listed on their removal orders without giving them any notice. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, decrying the government’s “flagrantly unlawful conduct.” Sotomayor wrote, “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution.”
McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokesperson, had a different response: “Fire up the deportation planes.” Shortly after the ruling came down, ICE deported the South Sudan Eight and the Eswatini Five. Among those sent to Eswatini was Orville Etoria, a sixty-two-year-old man who’d lived in New York for nearly fifty years.
In late August, I met with Etoria’s aunt Margaret McKen at her home in Canarsie, Brooklyn. A professor at Hunter College’s School of Education, McKen confessed that she was reluctant to talk with me. (I agreed to use her maiden name.) “I’ve been a naturalized citizen for thirty years, and I don’t even have a parking ticket, but you never know what they can do to you,” she said. “I’ve started to have a phobia that ICE will come and break down my door.”
Still, McKen felt that the public ought to know what had happened to her nephew, and who he was. Born in Jamaica, Etoria came to Brooklyn at the age of twelve, in 1976. He lived with his mother in Crown Heights, where she worked at a day-care center. As a young adult, Etoria suffered from psychiatric problems. In 1997, he was convicted of second-degree murder, for shooting a man in a leather-goods store, and received a sentence of twenty-five years to life. Eventually, an immigration judge issued an order of removal against him, meaning that he could be deported once he got out of prison.
Etoria had been convicted of a serious crime, but, McKen said, he had evolved as a person. While incarcerated, Etoria had earned a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science and worked toward a master’s in divinity. After his release, in 2021, he got a job at a homeless shelter in Queens, helping to get health care and housing for men who needed support, as he once had. He lived in a three-story brownstone, which he shared with his mother and one of his two adult sons.
They were a close-knit family, McKen told me, noting that, upon his release, Etoria had cared for his mother through a terminal illness. “When Orville was in prison, his mom was like the mailman—rain, sleet, or snow, she’d always travel to see him,” McKen said. “When he came home, he eased his mother’s burden, cleaning the house, buying groceries, and cooking her oxtail and salmon.” More recently, McKen recalled, “He got a car, and he told me, ‘I’m paying my own water bill!’ ”
At a routine ICE check-in this past spring, an agent told Etoria that he had ninety days to prepare his Jamaican passport. Shortly after he reported back to ICE, in June, McKen got a call from one of Etoria’s sons, saying, “They detained him and he’s not coming home!” She tracked Etoria’s whereabouts, using ICE’s online locator, as he was transferred from Manhattan’s Federal Plaza to Orange County, New York, and then back to Manhattan. She arranged for relatives in Jamaica to prepare a place for him to stay, in case he was sent back there.
Then Etoria vanished from the ICE tracker. McKen panicked. “God, are you going to send us a message?” she asked. He had been missing for more than two weeks when, one morning, McKen looked at her phone and saw an image that made her jump: Etoria’s face, in an online news dispatch. McKen clicked on the story. She found her way to McLaughlin’s announcement that Orville and four other “barbaric” men had been deported to Eswatini.
“Orville isn’t a monster,” McKen told me. “We get it—we know what he did was wrong. We raised our children to respect that there are consequences. But, if you paid for those consequences once already, why a second time? It’s a political ploy, to keep us in line. It’s them saying, ‘I have the power to destroy you.’ ”
McKen called the office of Jamaica’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade and learned that the country had not declined to take Etoria back. The minister implied online that the government had not even been asked. McKen couldn’t reach Etoria in Eswatini. “We are wondering if we will ever see him alive again,” she said.
McKen wondered, too, who else the Trump Administration might deport this way. It had started off its third-country removals with men like Etoria, who had served out criminal sentences. But soon she saw more third-country removals unfolding in the news, affecting a broader group. Less than a week after our conversation, news broke about the third-country deportations to Ghana, which included men and women who’d never been charged with any crime.
On September 12th, Meredyth Yoon and her colleagues filed their lawsuit on behalf of five of the people who’d been sent to Ghana. The attorneys pleaded that their clients were “now in immediate danger of being sent on, within hours, to their countries of origin,” despite the fact that immigration judges acknowledged that they would likely face persecution or torture there.
Late that night, I spoke to Yoon. She told me, “It’s absolutely shocking and illegal. And it fits this Administration’s general pattern—draconian, cruel processes that create a spectacle and coerce people into leaving of their own accord.” She added, “I hope we can do something. I hope we can stop this train.”
The next morning, I received the call from Yoon’s clients in the Ghanaian military camp. “Here, it’s all bushes and forest,” Jim told me. He wanted to start his story back in Louisiana, where a violent removal operation had taken place in the dark on September 5th. “They came to our cell,” he said, “and woke us in the middle of the night.”
Jim had asked the agents where they were taking him. They refused to answer. “I need to talk to my attorney,” Jim said, adding, as Yoon had advised, “I fear for my life if sent back to Liberia.” An agent called over a group of colleagues. “They punched me—I have bruises right now from it—and they kicked me,” Jim told me. “Then they put me on the ground, handcuffed me, and put me in a straitjacket.” He’d wept as they dragged him through the dark onto a tarmac. Other men in full-body restraints and chains were also being forced onto the flight, screaming and crying.
“Sir, all I asked is to speak to an attorney because I fear for my life,” Jim repeated. At that point, he told me, the agents carried him “like cargo” onto the military plane. “That’s what you get for not coöperating,” one of the agents said, according to Jim.
As Jim spoke, other men crowded around the phone, calling out similar stories. A heavyset Chicago resident, T.L., confirmed the violence of ICE’s initial removal. “They beat me up and punched me to the ground,” T.L. told me. He’d come to the U.S. years ago, fleeing political persecution in Nigeria. He made a good life for himself in Chicago, and had children; he found work as a cleaner in a hospital and at UPS. But, in 2022, he was sentenced to two and a half years in federal prison, for bank fraud. When he got out, he said, ICE agents instantly detained him.
T.L. fought his deportation, and a judge granted him relief under the Convention Against Torture (CAT), agreeing that T.L. was “more likely than not” to face torture in Nigeria and barring the government from sending him back there. Protection by way of CAT—and a similar status known as “withholding of removal”—doesn’t include the full benefits of asylum, such as a path to citizenship. But typically, under both Republican and Democratic Administrations, people granted these forms of relief have been allowed to keep living in the U.S. Technically, they could be deported to a country where they did not have credible fears of torture or persecution, but that rarely happened, and, when it did, it required a series of careful steps. (The American Immigration Council has attested that a mere 1.6 per cent of people who were granted withholding of removal in 2017 were deported to a third country that year.) Clear due-process rights governed such removals. “But then, when the ICE agents came for me,” T.L. said, “no laws worked.”
T.L. told me that he refused to board the ICE flight on September 5th without speaking to his attorney. He said that he’d also been placed in full-body restraints and dragged onto the plane by ICE agents. T.L. and Jim both told me that the agents had said, “Either you go the easy way or you go the hard way.” Trump used similar phrasing earlier this year, in a promotional video for a new Customs and Border Protection app that allows immigrants to declare their intent to self-deport, saying, “People in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way or they can get deported the hard way, and that’s not pleasant.”
In a statement to The New Yorker, McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokesperson, said, “Any claim that ICE personnel ‘beat,’ ‘kick,’ or ‘drag’ detainees or use ‘straitjackets’ is categorically false.” She also wrote, “Every single detainee receives due process. Get a grip.” Of the people who were sent to Ghana, she added, “Many of these were heinous criminals with rap sheets that included injury to a child, robbery, aggravated assault, and fraud.”
But the group in Bundase Training Camp also included people such as D.A., a Nigerian human-rights advocate who’d never been convicted of a crime. In Nigeria, his work on behalf of tribal groups facing displacement by the government had led to death threats. Eventually, he’d sought asylum in the U.S., and an immigration judge granted D.A. protection from deportation to Nigeria through CAT, affirming his fear of torture. But, on September 5th, he said, he was beaten and forced onto the flight. D.A. recalled an ICE agent telling him, “Your ass is getting on the plane.” He responded, “You’re abusing your badge.”
As we spoke, D.A. looked terrified. “I did everything possible to try to do the right thing,” he told me, emphasizing that he’d followed U.S. asylum law. He is married to a U.S. citizen from Texas. “Today, they brought a Nigerian officer from the consulate to see me!” he said. “I want the people of the United States to know my life is in danger—not just back home in Nigeria but also in Ghana.”
As D.A. and others panned the camera across the camp, I noticed several women standing in the group. I asked if they, too, wished to speak. A woman whom I’ll call Miriam stepped forward. She had lived in Lomé, the capital city of Togo, where, she explained, in a warm, gentle voice, she’d studied marketing, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and hoped for a career in the import-export business.
But, when Miriam was in her twenties, her life took a turn. Her relatives expected her to return to her father’s ancestral village, to submit to ritual genital mutilation. She refused and escaped to Ghana, where, she said, an uncle offered her protection but raped her instead. She tried hiding in another city in Togo, she recounted, but relatives found her there and tortured her for days. Finally, Miriam fled to the U.S., taking a flight to Brazil and trekking across more than a dozen borders to reach Texas. “I fought as best I could,” she told me. An immigration judge in Arizona granted her withholding of removal. She assumed this meant safety. “But instead they just deported us,” she said.
Miriam ushered forward the youngest person in the group, a slender woman with braids who stood there putting on a brave face. “She’s only twenty-one years old,” Miriam said, of the woman, who was also from Togo.
The twenty-one-year-old waved. She did not speak English, but others interpreted. She’d arrived in the U.S. seeking asylum last November. An immigration judge granted her withholding of removal. I later obtained her account in writing, translated by another detainee. “I was forced to go through female genital mutilation for them to give me to an old man for a marriage which I refused,” it read. “I ran to the U.S. to save my life.”
One result of the surge in third-country deportations has been the creation of a detective agency of sorts, comprising attorneys, human-rights groups, and flight-tracking experts. Together, they’ve been trying to solve the mystery of who is being deported, and to where, and when.
The flight trackers are often the first to warn that a deportation is afoot. Their digging originated with the work of a retired JPMorgan Chase executive named Tom Cartwright, who, in 2020, took up a new volunteer effort: using publicly available aviation data to track ICE flights. Human Rights First has formalized and expanded Cartwright’s log, tallying more than seventeen hundred deportation flights in the first nine months of the second Trump Administration. “Just keeping up has been a monumental effort,” Savitri Arvey, a refugee-protection expert working on the project, told me.
Arvey gave me an example. “Late Wednesday night, there was a flight out of J.F.K. with all the characteristics of a third-country removal to Uzbekistan,” she told me. “It wasn’t the normal flight number for flights to Uzbekistan, and we saw that the plane was parked on the tarmac, not at the gate, and it left six hours late,” she said. “The stars align with a repatriation, but we’re digging to get confirmation, since it’s all been a mystery.” Unless a person on a deportation flight calls someone in the U.S., Arvey said, that person’s fate remains “a total black hole.”
The State Department declined to comment on the details of its diplomatic communications with other governments. But the U.S. has reportedly sought third-country-deportation agreements with nations including Ukraine, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, and Kosovo, sometimes threatening countries with economic or diplomatic consequences if they don’t oblige. In court, ICE has invoked agreements for which no records were apparent. I obtained a sworn declaration from an ICE officer which stated that “the U.S. Department of State currently has a valid agreement with Bolivia to accept third country removals.” The officer attested that ICE had served a young Colombian woman with “notice of removal to Bolivia” and that D.H.S. had scheduled her flight. But the woman’s lawyer told me that she could find no public reports or evidence of such a deal. The lawyer won her client’s release after an ICE official admitted in court that the woman could not, in fact, be sent to Bolivia.
The financial incentives driving these agreements have also been hidden from public view. Last March, the Trump Administration paid El Salvador more than four million dollars to imprison non-Salvadoran deportees. But in most places the numbers remain undisclosed. I obtained a copy of the “memorandum of understanding” that the U.S. government signed with Eswatini, revealing that the U.S. had agreed to pay the country more than five million dollars in exchange for accepting up to a hundred and sixty foreign-national deportees. I also reviewed a copy of the deal struck with Rwanda: in that instance, the U.S. pledged $7.5 million in exchange for taking up to two hundred and fifty deportees. Both Eswatini and Rwanda made a commitment to “prevention of refoulement.” In June, two activist groups, the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and Refugees International, sued the State Department, seeking the release of deportation agreements with a half-dozen countries. In the lawsuit, which is ongoing, the groups argue that the government shirked its duty to fulfill their Freedom of Information Act requests, leaving critical information “shrouded from public view.”
In Eswatini, where Orville Etoria and four other men had been detained, Etoria’s family and a group of U.S. advocates found a local lawyer named Sibusiso Magnificent Nhlabatsi to take up their cause. “These men haven’t committed any crime in Swaziland, and they finished their sentence in the U.S., so under what circumstances are they being detained without access to counsel?” Nhlabatsi asked me in September. “It’s a textbook case of kidnapping and human trafficking, at the center of which is the United States, with Swaziland as an active accomplice.”
When Nhlabatsi first went to visit the men, he told me, “I thought I’d walk into the prison, see these men, help out, and that would be the end of the matter.” But the prison deputy denied him access to them, saying that they hadn’t yet had a chance to reach their families. Nhlabatsi returned the following week, and was told to come back the next day. When he returned again, he was informed that the men had refused to see him. Later in the day, Etoria and the others called home, and all said that they had not been told of such a visit.
On July 31st, Nhlabatsi filed a habeas petition in a court in Eswatini, asserting the men’s right to legal counsel. “The right to legal representation is not a privilege to be granted at the convenience of the correctional services, but a non-negotiable right that attaches from the moment of detention,” he wrote. But, on multiple occasions, the government ignored its legal deadline to respond to the case. When Nhlabatsi was slated to appear in court in mid-September, the court went into recess without informing him. “These men have a right to a fair hearing, and the right to be presumed innocent, and the right to a speedy trial,” Nhlabatsi told me. “I cannot let this injustice go unchallenged.”
Nhlabatsi was frustrated. He knew, too, that he was risking his life to stand up for these men. In 2023, his mentor, a prominent human-rights lawyer and pro-democracy activist named Thulani Maseko, was shot dead in front of his wife and children, after years of advocating for an end to Eswatini’s monarchy. Now that Nhlabatsi was in the local press defending the U.S. deportees’ basic right to counsel, he was getting regular calls from friends. “They weren’t encouraging me,” Nhlabatsi told me. “They were saying, ‘Are you sure you’re safe?’ ”
Then, in late September, I got an update from Etoria’s lawyer in Brooklyn, Mia Unger, of the Legal Aid Society. He had just been released, and was the first person to make it out of Eswatini’s black site. He was nervous about speaking out—the Trump Administration had described him to the public as “barbaric,” and he worried about the repercussions for his family. But, eventually, he decided that he would talk to a journalist for the first time.
When I reached Etoria, I learned that he had been my near-neighbor in Brooklyn. We spent our weekends in the same parts of Prospect Park, enjoying the people-watching. “I love Eastern Parkway—just sitting on the benches under the trees in the summertime, watching kids go by on their bikes and families hanging out,” he told me. “New York is what I know.”
When Etoria showed up to his ICE check-in last June, he knew immediately that things had changed. “I gave my passport to the officer, and he said, ‘Step to the back wall,’ ” he told me. At 26 Federal Plaza, in lower Manhattan, he slept on the floor. “That place was too filthy for any human being to live,” he said. From there, he was punted between ICE facilities and finally taken to the El Paso Service Processing Center, in Texas.
The true shock came soon after. On July 14th, Etoria was called down to intake with a group of men of diverse nationalities. He assumed that they’d be deported to their respective countries. They walked onto the tarmac. “For real, I thought I was going to Jamaica,” Etoria told me. “Why would I think I was going anywhere else?”
The men boarded the ICE flight in shackles. The idea of returning to Jamaica felt, to Etoria, like “an unimaginable loss.” Someone asked, “Where are we going?” An agent replied, “The first flight is six hours, and then the second flight is eight hours.” Etoria felt his stomach drop. They stopped in Djibouti, where the men were transferred onto a military cargo plane. “It was like something you’d see in a movie, as if we were some notorious gangsters,” Etoria said. Roughly a half hour before that flight landed, the men learned their true destination. “The officer came around wanting us to sign a paper saying we agreed to go to Eswatini,” he told me. “I’d never even heard of Eswatini!” Panicked, he refused to sign.
“We all expressed the same disconnect from reality in that moment,” Etoria said. He told me that an ICE official had snapped paparazzi-style photographs as he stepped off the plane, still wearing chains. He felt like an unwilling prop in an ad for the Trump Administration. “You could tell it was a charade, all for show, so that they could use it and say, ‘Look what we did,’ ” he said.
“To be honest,” Etoria added, “it helped me imagine how the slaves might have felt, going to another land in shackles and chains—that loneliness, that disconnect, that sense of loss.”
Local guards shuttled the group to Matsapha Correctional Complex, a maximum-security prison. No one explained the grounds on which the men were being held. At first, Etoria said, the guards treated the U.S. deportees with suspicion. “They’d seen a military plane come onto their land—the kind of plane that drops bombs on people and takes troops to war—and they were told, ‘These five men are people to be afraid of.’ But, over time, we conversed with the guards, and they could see that they’d been lied to about who we really were.” Soon, the guards gave the men a chessboard. They fielded Etoria’s complaints about the food, although it hardly improved. “For the first three days, we ate only porridge, and I raised my hand real quick and said, ‘No more!’ ” Etoria told me.
The Eswatini Five had only occasional monitored calls to their families and little to no access to their lawyers in the U.S. Mostly, they spent time in their cells. “We looked up at the ceiling a lot, and we talked about our families,” Etoria said. “We tried to help each other release the thoughts that were inside of us that were screaming to come out, the things that meant the most to us, and family was the No. 1 thing. The second-biggest thing was realizing that our lives had meaning—that we weren’t the bad, bad people that society had told us we were.”
Weeks passed. One day in late summer, officials from the International Organization for Migration visited the group. They brought “mental-health” provisions: badminton equipment, a basketball, Ping-Pong paddles, and five novels. Etoria stressed that what he really needed for his mental health was freedom. Soon after, he said, I.O.M. informed him that he would soon be able to return to Jamaica. On September 21st, he boarded the first in a series of four commercial flights that brought him to the island. No one knows how much money the U.S. government spent on this elaborate detention detour to Africa.
In Jamaica, Etoria has wondered about the men left behind: the Eswatini Four. They remain imprisoned without explanation, and without clear paths to repatriation. Ten more people have been added to the group. “There is something sinister going on here, and something has been taken from my spirit that I might never get back,” Etoria said. In mid-October, his Cuban cellmate, Roberto Mosquera del Peral, began a monthlong hunger strike. “Roberto is an unbelievably kind dude, who likes to analyze stuff with a critical mind,” Etoria said. Mosquera del Peral’s attorney, Alma David, of Novo Legal Group, told me during the strike, “I’m very worried—he has been in pain and looks very thin.”
Eswatini has continued to rebuff Nhlabatsi’s attempts to meet with the detained people. He finally won his habeas case in front of a judge, only to have the government file an appeal. In response to Mosquera del Peral’s hunger strike, Eswatini issued a press release. “The third country national was found to be in good health and spirits,” it read. “He did, however, mention that he was currently fasting and praying because he was missing his family.”
When we spoke recently, Etoria was hunkered down without electricity in the home where he’s been living in Jamaica. His phone was dying, and Hurricane Melissa—a Category 5 storm—was headed toward the island. He worried about not having stocked up on groceries. “I’ll just rough it out,” he told me. Since landing in Jamaica, he said, he has felt completely lost. “I’m trying to catch up, trying to fit in, but, at my age, it’s not easy to get a job here,” he said.
Etoria hopes that, at some point, he can confront the U.S. government about his treatment. But, even more so, he wishes that he could speak to African leaders, as a Black man who feels he was sent across the Middle Passage in reverse. “I want to say, to all the African nations who are taking people into their country in chains and shackles, it’s not a good picture,” he said. “You’re hurting these people, spiritually and emotionally. I don’t just want Eswatini to hear it. I want Ghana to hear it. I want South Sudan to hear it. I want Rwanda and Uganda to hear it.” He paused. “Please,” Etoria said, “let the Trump Administration take care of its own dirty work.”
On a recent evening, I spoke again to Meredyth Yoon, who told me that another deportation flight from the U.S. to Ghana—she believed it to be the fourth—had just landed. Among the latest deportees was a Maryland nurse named Rabbiatu Kuyateh, who’d lived in the U.S. for roughly thirty years and has never faced criminal charges. Kuyateh had won withholding of removal, convincing an immigration judge that she’d likely face serious harm in her native Sierra Leone. Even so, she was shackled and sent to Ghana, where she and others were held under armed guard at a hotel near Accra. Yoon had been on the phone with Kuyateh and other detainees, she said, when Ghanaian officials came to the hotel and dragged Kuyateh away. They put her on a flight to Sierra Leone.
Since we’d first spoken, Yoon had been trying to defend the rights of dozens of people who’d been deported to Ghana. In mid-September, she and her colleagues had appeared in U.S. district court, where they argued that members of the first group of deportees should be returned, swiftly, to America. At the time, eleven men and women were still held at Bundase Training Camp; they were hearing rumors that at any moment they could be sent back to their home countries, from which the U.S. government had promised them protection. “There is still time to act,” Lee Gelernt, who had joined the case from the American Civil Liberties Union, had pleaded. “We would implore you to do some kind of relief now.”
The Justice Department attorney, Elianis Perez, did not contest the basic fact of the removals. Instead, she insisted that the U.S. had obtained “diplomatic assurances” that Ghana would comply with the Convention Against Torture and other safeguards. Yet one member of the group—a bisexual Gambian man who had been granted protection under CAT by a U.S. immigration judge—had already been returned to his home country.
“How is that O.K.?” the judge, Tanya Chutkan, asked.
“Your Honor, the United States is not saying that this is O.K.,” Perez replied. “What the government has been trying to explain to the court is that the United States does not have the power to tell Ghana what to do.”
Two days later, Chutkan issued her decision. The deportations “appear to be part of a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly,” she wrote. Even so, she concluded, her “hands are tied.” The court lacked the jurisdiction to prevent Yoon and Gelernt’s clients from being deported by Ghana to their home countries. The resulting policy, Gelernt told me, is “unprecedented and wholly at odds with the humane discretion exercised by past Administrations of both parties.”
I wondered what would become of the terrified men and women I’d talked to in Bundase Training Camp. I soon found out. When I got hold of Jim, in early October, he and nine of the other people I’d spoken with had been placed in vehicles and driven out of the camp, to the border of Togo. Among them was Miriam, who feared torture or death if she was forced to return there, and the twenty-one-year-old Togolese woman who had also fled genital mutilation.
“Right now, we’re in Togo illegally!” Jim told me. He explained that Ghanaian immigration officials had left the group with Togolese officials who, rather than affording them proper documentation, had pushed them quietly across the border. “They passed us through the back door into Togo, but we aren’t invisible, and we’re an easy target for the cops,” he said. “We don’t speak the language here, and we have no money.” His family had tried to send him funds through Western Union. But he couldn’t easily obtain them, he said, because the U.S. government had confiscated his I.D. He and others in the group had to beg strangers to get the funds, for a cut of the cash.
Jim told me that he was trying to stay indoors, for fear of being detained or extorted by officials in Togo. But, on occasion, he’d been sneaking out to the ocean, to listen to the waves. He worried most about the Togolese women in their group. “They cried so helplessly, and they were scrambling and running for their lives,” Jim told me. “They’ve gone underground.”
A few days later, I spoke to Miriam, who was hiding in a boarding room. A local journalist had learned Miriam’s real name and published it on social media. Soon afterward, her cousin began receiving ominous calls from strangers, asking, “Where is Miriam?” She sobbed as we spoke.
“This morning, I drank a porridge, and it’s the only food I’ve had,” she told me. In her hiding place, she’d been rehashing her trajectory. She’d been shipped like cargo “from Arizona to Louisiana, and then Louisiana to Ghana, and then Ghana to Togo,” she said. “ICE treated us like animals, handcuffed us, and wouldn’t let us eat—just bread and water.”
At Bundase Training Camp, “they didn’t tell us that they would take us to Togo,” Miriam continued. She had tried to confront the Ghanaian officials as they shoved her group across the border. “Why are you doing this? You’re supposed to protect us, as a third country!” Miriam pleaded. An officer, she told me, said, “Shut up. We have to respect the orders we were given.” Some of the detained men were told they’d be shot if they tried to escape.
Back in May, Miriam told me, she’d been elated to receive protection from a U.S. immigration judge. She thought that this offer of refuge was what defined the United States. It was true, I told her. After the last British ship left New York Harbor in 1783, George Washington and his officers famously made a toast: “May America be an Asylum to the persecuted of the earth!”
“As I’m talking to you right now, I don’t know what will happen to me,” Miriam said. But, for the moment, she had one wish: “I need other people to know that this is my true condition. I am not free.” ♦
