Tesfay T., a 35-year-old man from Ethiopia, fled to the United States after having been imprisoned and tortured in his home country. He was tortured again in Mexico after being kidnapped there and crossed the US border as much to escape his abusers in Mexico as the torturers in his homeland. He spent more than a year in US immigration detention and was denied asylum because he had crossed the border irregularly, but an immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal,” a bar on returning him to Ethiopia because of the likelihood he would again be tortured there.

Tesfay said that in February 2026, while his US lawyer was working on a habeas corpus petition to secure his release from detention, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer told him to sign a voluntary departure form for his removal to Chad. “I refused,” he told us. He then said, “The ICE agent said, ‘I don’t care, I’m going to sign it myself.’ . . . I said, ‘I’m going to talk to my lawyer,’ but he said, ‘It’s too late.’”

He described the ordeal of the flight. “We were chained and handcuffed, legs, hands, stomach. . . . We flew all the way like that. . . . I couldn’t feel my legs, that was really painful. We could not stand up. When I had to use the bathroom, they didn’t even take off the chains . . . .” Tesfay said that as he was being transported, he kept asking where he was being sent, “They didn’t tell us anything about where we were going, what we were going to do there, nothing. . . . Then we found out when we landed in Cameroon.”

Between January 20, 2025, and August 5, 2026, the United States expelled more than 500 people to countries in Africa that were not their countries of origin, according to ICE deportation data. People sent to Eswatini, Ghana, and South Sudan were arbitrarily detained in those countries and faced ill-treatment while in detention. Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Ghana sent some people onward to risk of persecution or torture in their home countries, violating the principle of nonrefoulement. In all receiving countries, many—if not most—people transferred by the United States have been left with no practical option but to return to their home countries regardless of the harms they face there.

Report by the Human Rights Watch