Mustapha Camara and immigrants like him had court protections that they thought made them safe from the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. They found themselves swept up nonetheless.
To deport these immigrants, the administration has partnered with foreign governments, many with spotty human rights records. In exchange for money and foreign policy favors, they have agreed to accept deportees who cannot be returned to their countries of origin.
But a New York Times investigation found that this program results in many of them being pushed back to the very countries where the Trump administration itself cannot legally send them. Some of the United States’ foreign partners have made clear that will happen. And when it does, the Trump administration continues sending planes full of deportees.
The Times identified more than 110 people who had court-ordered protections and were handed over to foreign governments, only to then be passed on to home countries where they risked torture, sexual abuse or persecution — risks that have been validated by American courts.
In these cases, America’s partners served only as intermediaries. Officers roughed up immigrants or forced them onto airplanes. Some were threatened with imprisonment or confronted by armed police officers until they “volunteered” to return. Some now live in hiding. Others have simply vanished.
Human rights groups say that figure, which is certainly an undercount, shows that the Trump administration has created a bank-shot way of evading court orders and international law.
“It’s undermining the idea of asylum on a global scale,” said Alma David, a consultant with the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, referring to such forced repatriations.
“It’s immigration colonialism — making these governments do the dirty work,” she added.
Returning people to their countries of origin in the face of court orders would normally qualify as refoulement, a violation of international law. The State Department would not answer questions about whether its program amounts to refoulement by proxy. The administration has maintained that it has no say in, or responsibility for, what happens to deportees once they leave the United States.
But immigration and human rights lawyers say the United States does not even reliably tell foreign partners about court orders when deporting people. When American officials do pass on court instructions, those orders mean nothing to foreign governments, some of which have no functioning asylum system themselves.
An untold number of other people remain stuck in these intermediary countries, in limbo, terrified that they are next to be put on a plane.
One woman drank bleach while in custody in Ghana, hoping to avoid being returned to Senegal. Officials sent her back anyway.
Another deportee, a former political prisoner, said in a phone interview from Equatorial Guinea, where the authorities constantly threaten to again deport people, that “Nothing scares me more than hearing the words, ‘Go back. Go back.’”
“It’s my biggest fear,” he added. “It would be like going back into darkness, into emptiness.”
Documents viewed by The Times show that at least some American partners see their role as helping the Trump administration to send people to their country of origin, not to resettle them.
The U.S. government has said that it does not track what happens to deportees. The Times reached its figure of 110 repatriated people by reviewing court documents and conducting country-by-country surveys of lawyers, deportees and human rights advocates. The figure roughly aligns with data independently collected by Human Rights First, a nonprofit group that tracks deportations.
The number does not include the many more asylum seekers who were deported without receiving court hearings and also ended up back in their countries of origin.
The figure is sure to grow. The Supreme Court, after a brief pause in the program, recently allowed the administration to resume deporting immigrants to third countries without giving them a chance to object that they will be tortured or persecuted.
In response to questions about this article, the State Department wrote in a statement that all immigrants sent to third countries had been ordered deported and that the administration was simply enforcing the law.
“For aliens ordered removed who will not leave, the Trump administration will implement their removal orders by finding somewhere to send them,” the statement said.
The growth of the administration’s third-country deportation program is the story of how the Trump administration sought to remake the asylum system to fit with its views on who deserves protection. It is also the story of how, one Trump appointee, working under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, helped transform a State Department office from one that aids refugees into one that oversees deportations.
This article is based on a review of U.S. and foreign government documents, interviews with current and former U.S. and international officials, as well as interviews with deportees and their lawyers. Some spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity, either because they were in perilous situations and feared for their safety, or because they feared retribution for speaking to reporters.
Administration officials say that immigrants who are sent to third countries and then return home often do so voluntarily. But a video from Equatorial Guinea shows immigrants being threatened with imprisonment if they do not agree to leave. Some people who agreed to do so said they felt they had little choice after arriving in a strange country with no documents and no hope of resettling there. Others said they agreed only when armed police officers showed up.
Records show that immigration agents specifically targeted for deportation people who had court-ordered protections. There is no evidence that this was done with the intent of evading court orders. Rather, American officials said the goal was deporting them from the United States. Whatever happened next, they said, was not a priority.
Separately, senior administration officials have said they believe that stories about deportees in perilous situations overseas will encourage immigrants to voluntarily leave the United States.
Regardless of the intent, career State Department officials said in interviews that it was always clear that at least some at-risk deportees would ultimately be returned to their countries of origin — especially when the Trump administration began partnering with autocrats who have shown little respect for human rights. State Department and Homeland Security officials have debated and discussed refoulement and whether people were being coerced, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions.
Internal emails have circulated about the issue, including some sent by State Department lawyers. Separately, some agency lawyers have been frustrated over what they saw as a haphazard and secretive process from drawing up the agreements to carrying out the deportations.
The third-country deportation program is rooted in a belief, expressed by many senior Trump administration officials, that immigrants abuse the asylum system and that judges hand out protections too easily to refugees.
Stephen Miller, who on Friday was named White House chief of staff, is the architect and public face of the administration’s immigration policy. But day to day, officials said, the key figure behind the third-country deportation program is Andrew Veprek, a senior State Department official who shares Mr. Miller’s views and has worked closely with him for many years.
Mr. Veprek, a former consular officer, has said that “mischief by talented lawyers” allowed undeserving people to get asylum. In private, he has argued that refugees commit crimes at a relatively high rate, despite research showing the opposite, according to current and former officials.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Veprek began running refugee and immigration policy from a post in the office of counselor, which reports directly to the secretary of state. He then took over the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. He helped shrink the staff to dozens, from hundreds, and converted it from a refugee aid bureau into a deportation office.
Officials say he is now one of the State Department’s most powerful officials, a rare career diplomat embraced by Mr. Rubio and other senior Trump aides.
At a hearing on his nomination before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Mr. Veprek said his office should be at the forefront of “negotiating arrangements to accept the transfer of illegal aliens removed from American communities.”
He began looking for foreign partners almost immediately. And records show that immigration agents specifically targeted for deportation people who had court-ordered protections. People like Mr. Camara.
Mr. Camara came to the United States as a student in 2010 and overstayed his visa. He filed for asylum a few years later, an application that allowed him to stay and work. He was hired during the pandemic at Nebraska Medical Center.
Homeland Security denied his asylum application in 2022 and sent him before a judge for deportation. But the judge ruled that, as a bisexual man, he was likely to face persecution in hs native Gambia, a West African country with a history of arresting gay and bisexual people.
The judge granted Mr. Camara a status known as “withholding of removal.” That prohibited the government from returning him to Gambia. Last year, Mr. Camara legally married his longtime partner, who is American, and applied to remain in the United States permanently. (He said that he and his wife married years earlier in a religious-only ceremony.)
In the past, the judge’s ruling most likely would have kept Mr. Camara in the country indefinitely. Governments from both parties have routinely let immigrants in this situation stay in the United States by default.
Mr. Veprek, from his reinvented office at the State Department, has worked to change that.
Panama, the Trial Balloon
In February 2025, Mr. Veprek and Mr. Miller pursued a test case. They arranged to send a planeload of deportees to Panama.
Inside the State Department, diplomats assumed the move was a routine deportation of Panamanians. But they eventually realized that this group was unusual. It included Afghans, Chinese, Iranians, Somalis and Uzbeks — asylum seekers who faced the threat of arrest, torture or imprisonment.
The Panamanian security minister, Frank Ábrego, made clear that his country had no plans to resettle people permanently.
“We are providing them with all the necessary medical, food and comfort services,” he said at the time. “And we will continue to do so until the last one has left our country, which is what was agreed with the United States government.”
Within about a month, 179 of 299 deportees had been returned to their home countries, the International Organization for Migration told Human Rights Watch.
Officially, they did so willingly, but deportees and their lawyers described decisions that were hardly voluntary.
The Panamanian government dispatched the immigrants to an isolated jungle camp and made clear that there was no path to immigrating to Panama. A woman who was deported to Panama with her 12-year-old child agreed to return to Turkey in the face of years of indefinite jungle detention. She is now in hiding, her lawyer said.
“This administration doesn’t care if the people they’re deporting are going to have a difficult time,” said Larry Bartlett, a former senior State Department refugee management official who worked under Mr. Veprek. “They don’t care about the welfare of the people they’re deporting. They just want them out of the United States.”
The Trump administration viewed the Panama deportations and a similar pilot program in Costa Rica as proof that partner countries could help the deportation push.
None of the people deported at this early stage had court-ordered protections like Mr. Camara did. But almost immediately, records show, officials began considering whether foreign partners could be used in those cases, too.
In February, the same month as the first flight to Panama, ICE told agents to start reviewing cases of immigrants who had withholding-of-removal protections. Marcus Charles, a senior immigration official, instructed agents in an email to “determine the viability of removal to a third country and accordingly whether the alien should be re-detained.”
Deportation deals expanded quickly. The United States sent thousands of immigrants from multiple countries to Mexico. And Mr. Veprek’s office began eyeing agreements with African leaders, including in countries with poor human rights records.
On July 19, Mr. Camara pulled his car into his driveway just outside Omaha after an all-night hospital shift. ICE agents were waiting to arrest him. Records show that agents had identified him as someone with withholding-of-removal status who could be sent to a third country — just as the February 2025 email had instructed them to do.
He was stunned, both because he thought he had legal protection and because of the sudden turnabout in public opinion.
Nebraska has a nursing shortage, and the nation had considered health care workers heroes during the pandemic. Now, he was in handcuffs.
“You put your life on the line for the community,” he said, “and the next minute, it treats you like a criminal.”
Six weeks after his arrest, agents shackled Mr. Camara and pushed him onto a plane with eight other West Africans. American officials, he said, told them that they were going to Ghana, where they would be safe and allowed to live.
That was not the case.
Not a Home, Just a ‘Transit Point’
Ghana had no intention of resettling people.
In a sealed affidavit seen by The Times, Makeba Akosua Ayakor Tuapany, representing Ghana’s immigration service, wrote that people were being “deported from the United States to their home countries.” Ghana, she said, was “only used as a transit point.”
Diplomatic notes show that Ghana promised not to send immigrants onward to any country where they might be tortured or persecuted. That would seemingly prohibit repatriating anyone with withholding-of-removal orders from an American court. (To obtain those orders, immigrants actually have to clear a higher legal bar than for asylum.)
Ghana, like other countries, has not abided by that obligation.
“There is a wink, wink arrangement between the two countries,” said Oliver Barker-Vormawor, a Ghanaian lawyer who worked with some of the deportees to file a lawsuit in a regional court.
Just as the Ghanaian government affidavit said, more than 40 deportees who arrived have been repatriated, including a woman fleeing domestic violence, a gay man who feared persecution in his home country and a woman who escaped a civil war, lawyers for the deportees said.
Those who would not return to their home countries have been driven to the Togolese border and dropped off, usually with only the clothes on their backs and with no identification.
Despite this pattern, the United States has sent six flights to the Ghana since last year.
When Mr. Camara arrived, he was met by a Ghanaian immigration officer who identified himself as Mr. Ibrahim.
“You have three days, and then we’ll prepare your travel documents,” Mr. Camara remembers the officer saying. “And then you’ll leave to your respective countries.”
Mr. Camara and others protested. They had court orders, they said, protecting them.
“This is not America,” he said Mr. Ibrahim responded. “This is Ghana.”
‘That Is Textbook Refoulement’
Lawyers in Ghana have filed legal challenges on behalf of the deportees. In other countries, that is all but impossible.
The United States has partnered with governments that are notorious for rights violations and have unreliable court and asylum systems.
Among them is Equatorial Guinea, a small central African nation that the State Department itself says has engaged in torture, arbitrary detention and human trafficking.
Equatorial Guinea has sent nearly two dozen people back to their home countries despite U.S. court protections, according to interviews with deportees and lawyers.
While some agreed to leave, like a pair of Georgian nationals, others describe threats of violence. Immigrants said that police officers in Equatorial Guinea had threatened them at gunpoint and told them they would be sent to prison if they did not agree to return to their home countries. Deportees said local officials badgered them daily to get on planes.
Among them are four Ethiopians who had fled ethnic violence, received protection from American immigration courts and yet were returned there.
“They were so scared they complied with authorities and went home,” said Bella Mosselmans, a lawyer representing them. “That is textbook refoulement.”
The situation has become so bad that in July, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights issued an urgent appeal to the government of Equatorial Guinea to stop forcibly repatriating people, according to a confidential document seen by The Times. The country’s government did not heed the request.
One of the first people deported to Equatorial Guinea was a man named Diadié Camara, who had fled slavery in Mauritania and tried to find a new life in the United States. (Diadié Camara is not related to Mustapha Camara.) He was arrested in 2024 while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, but an American judge reviewed the evidence and ruled that he could not be returned to Mauritania.
Mr. Camara, his wrists and ankles bound, was put on a deportation flight late last year. The deportees did not know where they were headed until about an hour before landing, he said.
Initially, the authorities in Equatorial Guinea told them that they might be able to apply for asylum there. But the country has no functioning asylum system, the United States has said.
After about a week, Mr. Camara said, police officers told him that he had no choice but to return to Mauritania. They did not care about his U.S. court protections. He refused. Conditions in the hotel were bad, he said, but Mauritania — where the government is still working to root out slavery — is worse.
One night, the police banged on his door and forced him out of the hotel and into a car, according to Mr. Camara and witnesses. They put him on a flight to Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott.
Mr. Camara met a Times reporter there. He said he was living in hiding, evading retaliation from the people who had enslaved his family.
“I would rather die than stay here,” he said. “It’s a dire situation.”
One West African man said that, after witnessing what had happened to Mr. Camara, he agreed to be repatriated when officers banged on his door and took him to the airport in a police car.
“When military and police men come for you, you have to comply,” he said.
The Office of Remigration
Trump administration officials have denied that any of this amounts to refoulement. But they have also left ambiguous what is supposed to happen to immigrants once they arrive in third countries.
Mr. Rubio has described U.S. partners as being willing to “share the burden” of illegal immigration. Mr. Miller said last year that America’s partners “have very graciously agreed to help resettle nationals from other countries.”
Officials seldom address questions about people who are repatriated despite court orders, other than to say that what happens once immigrants are deported is not their responsibility. The United States has sought more partners and to expand the deportation program.
In April, the same month that the United States signed a new deportation agreement with Panama, Mr. Veprek spoke at an event hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based research group that favors curtailing immigration.
In his speech, Mr. Veprek recounted how the migration office used to be a “humanitarian assistance bureau” that was “in part focused on bringing people to the United States.”
“Now,” he added, “we are focused on implementing the president’s immigration agenda, including returning people from the United States to their home countries.”
Mr. Veprek and the official above him in the department, Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, exercised final approval over all the agreements, with the guidance of Mr. Miller. On daily group calls early in the administration, Mr. Miller would press them to get more expansive agreements.
To aid the efforts, Mr. Veprek oversaw the newly named Office of Remigration. “Remigration” is a controversial term that has long been used by far-right groups to refer to pushing immigrants out of the United States and European nations. The State Department official said the office works to end “mass and illegal migration” and to impose border security.
Civil servants said they were jarred by the notion that they were expected to help with “remigration.” The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration received money from Congress to help safely resettle refugees, but it was now deporting people. (Through the State Department, Mr. Veprek denied repeated requests to be interview.)
When Mustapha Camara landed in Ghana, officials took him and others to a hotel that was guarded by men holding assault rifles. Mr. Camara paid an official to use his phone so he could tell his family where he was.
Six days later, Ghanaian officials put him on a plane to Gambia, where he lives in hiding, staying indoors most of the time. His wife and children remain in the United States. Mr. Camara is working to get closer to them.
He is applying to become a nurse in Canada, which faces its own critical nursing shortage. That would open a path for him to emigrate there.
“I’ve missed nursing so, so much,” he said. “Nursing is my true calling, and the best part — that I’ve missed — is seeing patients discharged and feeling better.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington.
The post Immigrants Are Being Systematically Returned Home Despite Court Orders appeared first on New York Times.
