Banished: the secret Trump deals sending migrants across the world

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the immigrants sent by the Trump administration to random countries across the world.

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0:58Louisa Loveluck:I've been reporting every year See the immigration in Baltimore This is Rabiatu Kuwate Immersed from Sierra Leone She had been living in the United States For over three decades After she said she was forced to flee From political persecution in her home country They will ask if my address is current Earlier this year, she went, with her son Mohamed, to one of her regular check-ins with immigration services. We left here that morning. She went and checked in. We just, you know, waited in the room. I'm sure you know where this is going. In the era of Trump 2.0, we've grown used to these kind of stories.

1:40Like, the most, like, foreshadowing moment was, like, you know, we seen, like, two officers come in and they had, like, long, those big handcuffs, and she just literally said, like, Oh my God, I hope, you know, I hope that's not me. And then we were there for a while. Usually her check-ins are fairly, you know, fairly quick. Stories of families turning up to routine immigration appointments and for their lives suddenly changing in a heartbeat. And then they just said, um, Rabiatu? She said, yes. She said, yeah, we're detaining you. You have an order of removal. They closed the door and that's all I had said.

2:09And I, you know, I just was like, what?

2:12Louisa Loveluck:They said, um, they're going to detain me that day. So I questioned why. So I had to call my son. My son asked them, why is my mom not going to go home with me? Then they said, your mom had an order of removal and then we're going to put her in custody.

2:31What happens next to Rabiatu is also predictable. Like tens of thousands of other immigrants in the United States, she's immediately taken to a detention centre in Louisiana. But after this, things take an even darker turn. Because after a few months, Rabiatu is very suddenly taken from detention and driven to an airport. And then, handcuffed and shackled, she's put on a plane.

3:01Louisa Loveluck:They led me through the plane, so I had to manage, struggle to climb with the shackles in my feet and my hands. I was handcuffed and then they would walk me to a seat. And then I went to the seat. I was there for like hours. I couldn't talk. I was numb. Even as the plane begins to taxi down the runway, Rabiatu had no idea what was happening or where she was being taken. That's when they break the news to me. Now they are taking me to Ghana. I said, what? Ghana. A country Rabiatu had never lived in. A country where she knew nobody. What am I going to do in Ghana? Everyone kept saying, I don't know, just cooperate with us.

3:46And even when she arrived in Ghana, this wasn't her final destination. While the policy of deporting immigrants to other third countries is far from new, remember when the UK government tried to send asylum seekers to Rwanda? It's never been used widely, until now. Since 2025, the Trump administration has struck secret deals with governments around the world to accept people deported from the United States who have no connection to those countries. People from Peru and Colombia have ended up in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A Brazilian and a Cameroonian have been sent to Equatorial Guinea.

4:29And once dumped there, there is almost never a way back. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today on Focus, Destination Unknown, the human stories behind Trump's third country deportation policy.

4:53We've just heard Rabiato's really, really shocking story of how she was taken from her life in the US and sent against her will and in shackles to Ghana. Louisa Loveluck you're an investigative journalist at The Guardian and you've been part of a consortium of journalists from different media organisations looking into how people like Rabiatu are finding themselves in this terrible situation. Rabiatu was actually interviewed by one of your partners at France 24. When you started this project along with these other media organisations on Trump's deportations what were the questions that you were trying to get answers to?

5:33Well, when you look at the deportation project of the Trump administration, what you see is that a lot of it isn't at all secret. You know, they're publicizing it every day. For every gang member and criminal alien that are threatening so violently our people. And so there isn't much in the shadows. We will find you. We will arrest you. We will jail you. And we will deport you. But then we started to hear about these 25 ,000 people who'd been sent to third countries. It's now 20 countries have signed third country national agreements, meaning these are safe countries where individuals who refuse to go back to their country of origin can be sent to that country.

6:15We started to realise that there wasn't very much information about where people were going, who was going and what was in the deals. It was at that point that the Forbidden Stories organisation which led this project decided that bringing together a lot of different media organisations from different countries with different types of access would be the best way of addressing some of these questions. I was really shocked by you just said 25 ,000. I knew about these deportations to third countries that were being carried out, but I had no idea it was so many people. I mean, that is a lot of people.

6:48It must have actually been quite hard to track them down as well. it's very different types of people being sent to a lot of different places you've got 20 000 people have been put on buses and sent over the mexican border into mexico there's a 20 000 people who are not from mexico a lot of people don't have ties but then you have this other 5 000 people who had been put on planes to other countries around the world and at that point it starts to get very difficult and so piecing together kind of where everyone ended up bit by bit was incredibly painstaking and took a really big team. What's the point of sending asylum seekers like Rabiatu to third countries instead of just sending them home?

7:30Under American law, you're not allowed to send people back to places where they may face persecution, they may more likely than not face torture, imprisonment or death. And so the logic here has been to create a loophole. They create a situation where a third country will take them, as we say, it's somewhere that they often don't have connections to. But the logic that the administration puts forward is like, that's okay, because it's not the place where they face persecution, torture, death. That said, what is often the case and what seems to be part of these deals and a kind of like with a nudge and a wink is that they are then sent home.

8:06But it is not the United States sending them home. And indeed, when the Foreign Senate Relations Committee did monitor some of these deals earlier in the policy from 2025 onwards, They found that there wasn't any meaningful follow up. You know, it wasn't being watched what happened next. They were just being dumped. And then they're off the Trump administration's hands. Yeah, and I've read parts of that report. And there was this one statistic that really stood out to me. You know, it said that as of January this year, more than 80 % of people who have been deported to third countries, even if they're asylum seekers, they've already been returned to their home countries or they're in the process of doing so.

8:48Exactly.

8:52So how many of these deals have the US government signed with other governments to take people? So there have been 35 deals that we know of so far that comes from internal records from the State Department that our partners at the Washington Post were able to access. About a third of those countries are in Africa. A lot of them are in Latin America, but they're also in Central Europe, parts of the Caribbean. So it really at this stage is a globalized policy. 35 countries as well. I'm quite surprised by that. That's a lot of deals that have been struck in, I think, quite a short amount of time.

9:26It's only been a year or two, hasn't it? Yeah. And I mean, you know, the Trump administration has made a big deal about saying that the people it deports criminals, dangerous criminals. Did you find out anything in the investigation that spoke to that kind of dissonance between what the Trump administration is saying and the people that are ending up on these planes? Well, the Trump administration certainly has deported some people with criminal records, but none of the people we spoke to for this story said they had criminal records. And on top of that, if you look at the substance of the deals the Trump administration has been striking with other countries, around half of them explicitly prevent the transfer of violent criminals to their countries.

10:09So not even the deals really do justice to that argument.

10:24Louisa Loveluck:My name is Rabiatu Kuyate, I'm from Sierra Leone, West Africa. but I've left there during my early years when I was young. I've been in the United States for over 30 years. And Louisa, let's go back to what happened to Rabiatu Kiate, the nurse from Sierra Leone that we heard about at the top of the episode. What was her life like in the United States before she was put on that plane to Ghana? I've worked as a nurse for over 20 years. I started as a nursing assistant. I went to a school of nursing. I have passion for nothing. I help people. She was someone who said that she had managed an isolation ward during COVID.

11:03The units that I was running, the people were dying in my hands.

11:07Louisa Loveluck:That was the time the governor had a state of emergency that loved ones should not go visit. I stood by their bedside. People died in my hands when their loved ones were not there. I gave them the last care. And she not only owned a house in America, looked after her parents, she was a full-time carer and very deeply embedded in the fabric of the lives of American families. I was never a criminal. I paid my due taxes. I've never, I abide by the law. I imagine you went to the Department of Homeland Security about Rabiati's case. What was it that they told you in response to your questions? So the response we received from the American government referred to Rabiotu as a criminal illegal alien, saying that she had re-entered the United States illegally and that that was a felony.

11:59Now, Rabiotu did not have settled status in the US, but as a result, she was checking in with immigration authorities every year. She had a work permit. She was working legally. So Rabioti says that she was afraid to return to Sierra Leone because her father's politics had meant that the family faced serious persecution in the past. And the American immigration judge agreed that the risk to her was so large that she should not be removed from the country. And they had given her withholding of removal, which basically means that she should not be sent back to the country that she was from because she'd be in trouble.

12:34And so if the judge found that, how does she end up being put on a flight and being sent off to Ghana? Well, in short, ICE is ignoring these protection orders. They're not, to my understanding, legally binding. But one thing that an immigration lawyer told me was that prior to this administration, if you got withholding of removal, you would basically be told by your lawyer that you were good, that you would have to do your check-ins with ICE, that you would have to make sure you maintained a clean record. But by and large, these weren't people who were looking over their shoulders or people who, you know, at traffic stops or wondering if their immigration status was going to be an issue.

13:14It was seen by most people as convention, as settled status. And this is something that the Trump administration is upending. So what happened to Rabiatu after she was taken from detention in Louisiana and sent to Ghana? So when Rabiatu got to Ghana, she was put in a hotel for several days.

13:32Louisa Loveluck:Then after breakfast, close to midday, I was sitting down. Then I saw some officers. They came and approached me. If I'm ready, I said, ready for what? And they're going to take me to the airport. They said they're going to take me to Sierra Leone. I said, I'm not going to Sierra Leone. I said, I'm afraid to go there. And she was so distressed when that idea was raised, when they told her that that's where she was going, that she refused.

14:01We've seen this incredibly distressing video of her being removed to Sierra Leone. What we see in the video is that ultimately she was dragged out of the hotel, out onto the tarmac by her hair, as she screamed, I'm not going. I mean, that's just incredibly distressing, isn't it? I've seen the video as well, and it's really, really, really hard to watch. She was telling them, you can't send me back. It's not safe for me.

14:36Louisa Loveluck:Sir Oliver, help me. These people, I don't want to go to Seattle. I'm not safe to go there. They grabbed me. They dragged me. That was when they forced me in the car. And this is something we heard from a lot of the other people we've interviewed. Ultimately, they would be told by the third country that they were being sent back, but their response would be, you can't. But of course they can because they have the security guards, they have the power and they can put them on planes.

15:13So Rabiatu ends up being sent back to Sierra Leone, the country she was fleeing from when she went to the US. In the course of your reporting, what other similar stories did you hear? One of the main cases that I was following was of a 32-year-old Iranian woman called Nika. It's so nice to see your face. I've heard about you for so long. And we've got a recording of your call with Nika and a translator. Listen, I'm not going to take too much time. What did she tell you about her situation? She'd been a protester against the regime back in Iran, and she had fled to America through 11 different countries before being detained at the border 18 months ago.

15:57She spent 18 months in detention in the United States before being briefly let go because a judge had said that she faced a credible risk of being persecuted if she did go back home. When she was released like a week before prior from the detention center with the habeas grants. But within days of being let go and of kind of finally being free, you know, kind of unfurling, spending time with her family and thinking that that was it. She was picked up again by immigration authorities. She was put on a plane. They were sitting in shackles. Being in shackles for long flights where it becomes incredibly painful.

16:52Your wrists, your legs, they swell with the altitude. She said that some of her sort of fellow passengers were in full body wraps. I mean, they were sort of mummified in their chains and in the wraps. What's a body wrap? A body wrap? I mean, the best way I can kind of visually describe it is it's almost like PVC, black and yellow, kind of like being tied up like a sort of a chrysalis. So you can't move head to toe. And people had been put in those if they were not complying with the immigration officers. the other people on your plane did they understand did they know the place

17:31Louisa Loveluck:nobody understand nobody know know about where we're gonna go when she was told at some point that she was going to quote unquote africa right africa she said she told the people who told her she was like that's a pretty big place i'd like you to specify there was this um video of the map that where the plane was going. So they were kind of mapping in real time where they were headed by looking at that little map that you get on the aeroplane TVs. Yeah, and she said that they were asking the officers aboard where they were going, and they were being told, we won't tell you. Sometimes they were making sort of jokes about where they would be going, but they weren't telling them.

18:16Another map comes up, and this time it's Bangui in the Central African Republic, which is one of the poorest countries on earth. And she said there were people on that plane who hadn't even heard of it as a country. At the time, I was so in shock of not knowing what part of the ward I was at. They just took the shackles off and the chains, and they told us to leave the plane. We have video of the moment they landed, and you see one by one, these people are coming down the steps they look sort of quite disoriented and nika said that for several hours after that they didn't even meet anyone who spoke english they only spoke french and they were just like with like hand gestures like get on a bus they put us in the bus and then they took us somewhere to give us some vaccinations i didn't even know what type of vaccinations

19:16Louisa Loveluck:they are going to inject me. Sorry, she was injected with a vaccine that she had no idea what it was. That's what she said.

19:35Well, I should probably quickly describe the situation in Central African Republic. It's this landlocked country in the middle of Africa that's been in the grip of this terrible long-term civil war. the US Department of State actually warns its own citizens not to travel there because it says it's too dangerous but Nika she doesn't even know if this is where she's going to end up staying right yeah and she's now waiting under kind of it's not house arrest you know she can go out that she doesn't feel safe doing so she's now just waiting to find out if she's going to be sent back to Iran or whether this is where she lives now I mean I guess it's also worth pointing out that you've had to change Nika's name, right?

20:17Because she doesn't feel safe. That's not her real name. There is a cruel irony, isn't there, about the fact that Nika is from Iran taking part in the protests that Donald Trump himself urged the Iranian people to participate in before he began his war in Iran. With a New Truth Social out earlier this morning, in it he wrote, quote, Iranian patriots keep protesting. Take over your institutions. He goes on to add, I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian officials until the senseless killing of protesters stops. Help is on its way. Coming up, how do these so-called third countries like Ghana and Central African Republic profit themselves from these deportation deals?

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