The United States is now deporting migrants fleeing war or persecution in their home countries to the African nation of Cameroon, often in defiance of U.S. courts.
As the New York Times reports, none of them is from Cameroon but they have been offloaded there in secret. Those detained say they can leave the state-run facility there only if they agree to return to the countries they fled. The process represents a window into President Donald Trump’s campaign to circumvent the asylum process and hasten deportations.
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The United States has not announced any deal with Cameroon to warehouse foreign nationals and the State Department declined to comment to the Times. A Senate oversight report released last week disclosed that Washington has already paid $32 million in payments to third-country hosts under a process that was only rarely employed before Trump came back to Washington. The Senate report disclosed that the use of third nations is often a workaround to protections against returning migrants to homes where they would face persecution or death. It’s murky if those third nations are honoring asylum seekers’ requests to stay away from their home states but it is clear that U.S. law prohibits sending many of those seeking refugee status directly back.
Trump’s muscular removal of migrants from the United States is a hallmark of his second term. His crackdown has more than a few similarities with a military invasion of some cities, his roundups have left immigrant communities cowering and their neighbors defiant. Even some typical Trump allies have voiced concern that the efforts are easily seen as too aggressive.
Still, the Trump Administration seems determined to double-down, including sending in handcuffs at least nine asylum seekers from a detention center in Louisiana to Cameroon on Jan. 14. At least eight of them had court orders protecting them from removal from the United States as they sought to stay. It appears that was the first flight to move migrants from U.S. soil to that West African nation.
There, according to the Times interviews, two of the nine have accepted the demands that they return to their home nations on the belief they were ineligible to receive asylum in Cameroon. Some have been in this detention limbo for more than a year now and did not know their destination until they were shackled on flights out of the United States. None, their lawyers told the Times, had a record of violent crime. Instead, they feared retaliation for refusing to join the military or identifying as LGBTQ.
The pool of worldwide refugees tops a million people a year but less than 5% successfully find asylum through the United Nations.
Cameroon’s place in the U.S. network of off-the-book deportation destinations is a new disclosure but it’s hardly alone. Sites in Equatorial Guinea and Ghana have been stopover locations for asylum seekers—many of whom have U.S. court protections while they go through the system—being returned to their home countries against their will. It accounts for but a piece of the harsh system Trump is telegraphing to would-be refugees to look elsewhere.
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