Human Rights Watch: U.S. expelled 536 people to other African countries, often denying chance to contest

Human Rights Watch said Thursday that the Trump administration has sent more than 500 people to African countries that are not their own, often without a meaningful chance to challenge those removals, as the Supreme Court prepares to review the policy in December.

In a 125-page report released Oct. 8, titled “To Scare People: US Expulsions of Third-Country Nationals to Countries in Africa,” the rights group said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data show the U.S. expelled 536 people to African countries other than their countries of origin between Jan. 20, 2025, and Aug. 5, 2026. Human Rights Watch said that finding, detailed in Appendix I, was based on its analysis of ICE deportation data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, along with immigration court records, flight tracking and 24 interviews conducted between February and July 2026.

The interviews involved people transferred from the United States to Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini and South Sudan. Human Rights Watch said those interviewed consistently described being given little or no information about where they were being sent and no real chance to explain why removal to those countries could put them in danger.

The report said many described being shackled during flights that sometimes lasted 18 hours or more. Some said they were denied needed medication or other medical treatment. Human Rights Watch also said some deportees were arbitrarily detained on arrival, some were sent onward toward countries where they faced persecution or torture, and many were left with no practical option but to return to their home countries despite the risks there.

Third-country removals are deportations to a country that is not the person’s home country but agrees to accept them. U.S. law allows removals to another accepting country in some circumstances, but protections such as withholding of removal and relief under the Convention Against Torture bar the government from sending someone to a place where they are likely to face persecution or torture.

Human Rights Watch said the policy has also affected at least a dozen LGBT people sent to African countries that criminalize same-sex relations or public same-sex romantic conduct. According to the report, some had already been granted protection in the United States because of the danger they faced in their home countries.

One of the cases highlighted in the report is Tesfay T., a 35-year-old Ethiopian man. Human Rights Watch said he had received withholding of removal in the United States, meaning he could not legally be returned to Ethiopia because of the risk of torture there. The group said U.S. officials told him to sign paperwork for deportation to Chad. He refused, but ultimately ended up in Cameroon.

“Even before we got on the plane, we asked where we were going, and they told us, ‘You’ll find out when you arrive,’” Tesfay said, according to the report.

Human Rights Watch said public data sets do not share common personal identifiers, which can make exact matching difficult, but said the records it reviewed showed a clear pattern of removals to third countries in Africa.

The report arrives as courts are weighing whether the administration’s current process gives people enough notice and due process before they are sent to a third country. On Sept. 18, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that aspects of Department of Homeland Security guidance on third-country removals were unlawful and said people must receive prior notice of the specific country where they are to be sent, along with a meaningful opportunity to contest removal there.

But on Sept. 29, the Supreme Court put that relief on hold and set the case for argument in December, allowing the removals to continue while the justices review the dispute.

Michael Garcia Bochenek, interim U.S. program director at Human Rights Watch, said the practice is intended to inflict hardship. “Deporting people to countries where they have never set foot is part of a US policy designed to cause human suffering as a means to deter migration,” he said.

Human Rights Watch argues the policy violates U.S. and international nonrefoulement obligations, the rule against sending people to places where they face persecution, torture or likely onward transfer to such danger. The group called on the United States to stop third-country removals that do not provide those protections and urged African governments to suspend or end their participation.