The records, obtained and first reported by CBS News, detail three ICE-organized deportation flights that delivered deportees to Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini and other nations. In every case, those removed held no citizenship in the country receiving them.
The African flights are part of a broader arrangement that now spans more than 30 countries. Nations across Latin America — including Costa Rica, Panama and Paraguay — have long accepted deportees under similar terms. But African governments have increasingly joined the program, among them the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, nations already contending with armed conflict, political instability and human rights concerns, according to the documents.
Eswatini, the Central African Republic, and Liberia have taken in deportees originally picked up not in the U.S. border region but in Latin America, Europe and Asia, the records show, underscoring how far the pipeline now reaches beyond migrants' countries of origin.
The people aboard the recent flights were not limited to African nationals. Records show deportees from Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Nepal, Turkey and Venezuela were also removed to third countries in the same stretch, alongside African nationals detained separately.
Criminal histories among those deported vary widely. Some sent to Eswatini and South Sudan had been convicted of serious violent crimes in the U.S., and authorities there have already incarcerated them following their arrival, the documents indicate. Many others removed under the program, by contrast, have no criminal record beyond immigration offenses such as unauthorized entry or lack of legal status.
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Source: PAP