West Africans deported twice under US third-country policy

More than 30 people were deported to Ghana in 2025 from the US as part of the Western nation’s third-country policy, with 22 of them later being deported again back to their home country with no opportunity to raise legal objections, according to a Reuters report on January 16th.

According to migrant advocates and human rights activists, under the US’s third-country policy, the Trump administration is able to get round US and international laws prohibiting the return of people who face persecution and torture in their home countries.

Ghana, Rwanda, South Sudan, Eswatini, Uganda, and Equatorial Guinea have been approached as third countries for people to be deported.

In October 2025, a lawsuit was filed seeking to stop the Ghana deportations, citing that the arrangement was not approved in the Ghanaian parliament and is therefore unconstitutional.

Rabbiatu Kuyateh, who lived in Maryland in the US for 30 years, was detained when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were on their routine check-up. She is one of the deportees who had applied for protection in July 2025, fearing torture in her home country, Sierra Leone, as her father had ties with the opposition. Although a US immigration judge granted her request, she was deported to Ghana in November 2025, detained in a hotel for about six days, before being forced to return to Sierra Leone.

Diadie Camara, who is from Mauritania, was escaping hereditary slavery in his home country, which is common practice in the African nation. After being detained at the US-Mexico border in 2024, Camara was granted protection by a US immigration judge from being sent back to Mauritania.

But in November 2025, Camara, along with eight other migrants from countries like Angola, Eritrea, Georgia, and Ghana, were flown by the US to Equatorial Guinea, where they were detained for a few days and denied asylum. Camara and a fellow Mauritanian national were flown back to Mauritania through Morocco in December.

Other sources had confirmed that two flights carrying deportees had left the US in September and November 2025, with nationals from Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo being sent back to their home countries. However at least 10 of the third-country nationals were granted US protection for fear of their lives being at risk for their political views.

Elora Mukherjee, who directs the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School in New York, said: “If Ghana and Equatorial Guinea do not afford a meaningful opportunity to challenge repatriation, they are not safe third countries, and the United States should not be deporting individuals there,” she said.

The US State Department had previously declared that they had “received diplomatic assurances” from Ghana that the deportees would not be sent back home, without elaborating on the measures they would take to ensure this.

The US has been willing to make large payments to the African nations that have taken in deportees, although Ghana’s foreign ministry has denied that it receives financial compensation and is doing it on humanitarian grounds.

The Ghanaian foreign minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, was seen telling local media about the prospect of visa and tariff concessions in exchange for helping with the US’s “immigration challenges”. The Ghanaian government announced in September 2025 that the US was easing visa restrictions on Ghana, and the Western country later lifted a 15% tariff on cocoa and other agricultural products.

The third-country deportation policy raises serious questions about the safety and treatment of deportees, who are often held in unsafe places and sent back home without the right legal process. Washington-based judge, Tanya Chutkan, called the third-country policy the Trump administration’s way “to make an end run” around U.S. legal requirements, in which it abstains from sending migrants back home.

Reuters, Maghrebi.org