Deported from the US to Liberia: ‘They had us chained up the whole trip’

“I found out that I would be deported to Africa just hours before the flight. No one notified me; I found out myself by chance when I managed to see my name on the list of people who would be transferred to Liberia, a country I had never heard of before. I didn’t have time to defend myself legally or say goodbye to my family. I couldn’t do anything: everything was already decided.”

C. is a 36-year-old Venezuelan who had been living and working in the United States for five years. On August 19, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents put him on a charter flight that took off from Alexandria, Louisiana, for Liberia, in West Africa. He was being deported there along with other migrants from Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. This is the first group of nearly 1,200 people in total that the Liberian government led by Joseph N. Boakai agreed to receive in the space of a year after signing one of the largest bilateral agreements with the Trump Administration as part of the White House’s anti-immigration policy.

On arriving in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, six of the 20 people destined for Liberia reportedly refused to get off the plane and were consequently deported to Malabo, in Equatorial Guinea. Those who disembarked in Liberia, like C., have spent more than a week in a hotel in Marshall, a coastal town about 50 kilometres from the capital. They were taken there immediately and have no idea when they might leave.

Between January 20, 2025, and August 15, 2026, the U.S. government signed transfer agreements with more than 35 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In that same period, it deported more than 23,000 people to 26 nations, according to Human Rights First and Refugees International, two NGOs that monitor these deportations. More than 300 detainees have been taken to 14 countries in Africa, including Liberia, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eswatini, and South Sudan. According to the NGOs, most alarming is that among those expelled are people with regularized migratory status and a status known as withholding of removal — a form of protection that stops the U.S. government from enacting a forced repatriation to the migrant’s country of origin when there is a real risk of persecution or torture. It is a protection enshrined in the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the Convention against Torture.

C., who has this withholding of removal protection, never imagined he would end up in one of the poorest countries in the world. He spent his entire life in the Venezuelan Andes region and left in 2021, due to the political and economic crisis. “As a political opponent, I risked a lot in my last year there. I fled Venezuela because I was about to be killed,” he says. Once in the United States, he obtained a temporary residence permit with annual renewal that allowed him to work legally in the country.

“During the day, I worked selling vehicles and, in the evenings, I worked in food delivery. I led a normal life, respecting the law,” he says. “One day in December 2025, I showed up at the immigration offices for a routine check. After about half an hour, they told me that they were going to arrest me, that they had to do a special investigation into my case and that they would keep me in custody for the next two weeks until a decision was reached.” Those two weeks turned into eight long months of administrative detention that ended in deportation to a country C. has no family or legal ties to, and whose language is completely foreign to him.

“During those eight months, I was transferred to nine different detention centers. They are places no one would want to be: dirty and full of rats. They are centers that also hold people who have committed crimes, but I am innocent,” C. says. What upsets C. most is not having been able to be there for the birth of his only son. “When he was born, I was already in detention. Now he is five months old and I can’t hug him; I can only see him on video call. These are things you don’t wish on anyone.”

C.’s only consolation is that, unlike other migrants deported to Africa, he has not ended up in prison. The Liberian government said that people deported to Liberia would be free to move around the country, apply for asylum there or leave.

The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) states that administrative detentions, managed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE, are another immigration enforcement tool increasingly used by the Trump administration to illegally detain people without reasonable suspicion. As the American Immigration Council points out, continuous transfers from one center to another “often take people away from their loved ones and other support networks, taking them to places where access to legal assistance is practically impossible.”

In March 2025, the DHS published a document with guidelines for the deportation of migrants to third countries. The document states that, before expelling a person, the U.S. will verify whether that country offers guarantees that the detainee will not suffer expulsion or torture. If these guarantees exist and the State Department considers them credible, the person can be transferred without additional procedures and without asking if they feel unsafe.

When we arrived in front of the plane I tried to resist, but the agent said: ‘Either you collaborate and get on the plane or we take you up by force.’ As soon as we had taken our seats inside, we all burst into tears”

A., Venezuelan migrant in the US deported to Liberia

A., a 45-year-old Venezuelan deported to Liberia, says that before being expelled from the United States, he was transferred to four different detention centers in a matter of a few months, without his lawyer being informed at any time of the transfers or his deportation. “It all started at the beginning of this year when I went with my wife to the immigration office for the routine check-up. We both had protection against repatriation to Venezuela and we had a clean record. They let her go and detained me and then expelled me,” says A., who worked in the wind energy sector.

During his detention, A. suffered severe attacks of anxiety and depression. When he was put on the flight to Liberia, he was afraid he was being taken to his death. “I was panicking. ICE agents have that power: they terrorize you psychologically with their silences, their vague answers, and their mistreatment,” he says. “When we arrived in front of the plane, I tried to resist, but the agent said: ‘Either you collaborate and get on the plane or we take you up by force.’ As soon as we had taken our seats inside, we all burst into tears. They had us chained hand and foot for the entire trip [which lasted about 15 hours].”

Like many deported to Liberia, A. also had the withholding of removal protection. When he was initially told that he would be deported to Venezuela, he replied that he would run the risk of being persecuted as a political opponent. “They told me: ‘There’s no risk anymore. Venezuela is now free,’ but it is not free at all. Friends of mine from the opposition who live there still fear for their safety.”

“My daughter has been in therapy ever since my deportation. She always asks, ‘Dad, why are you there? You didn’t do anything,’” A. says, breaking down in tears. “My oldest son now says he wants to leave school and work to help the family in my absence. I try to be there for my children by video call, but the reality is that we are a traumatized family. They are destroying entire families.” A. now fears that ICE will also detain his wife. “If they take her too, my children will be helpless; they have no one there besides us,” he says. “I don’t want to live in the U.S. anymore. I would prefer to ask for asylum in Europe and take my whole family with me. They succeeded: they took away my desire to go back. If I didn’t believe in politics before, now I don’t even have faith in humanity.”

According to A., the deportees have been given “a good reception from the country from the beginning” and that “the hotel rooms are clean, everyone has their own space and we can come and go as we want. I don’t want to stay here, but at least I’m a free man,” he says.

W., 40, from Honduras, adds that staff from the International Organization for Migration visit them daily and that he is being assisted with his diabetes. None of the men interviewed want to stay in Liberia and, through a Liberian lawyer, they are in contact with law firms in the United States to work their cases. “The reality is very different when you leave the hotel. We all feel that we are not in a safe country,” says W., who never moves more than 10 meters from the door of the premises for fear of being assaulted or robbed.

Originally from Honduras, W. still hopes to return to the U.S. “I have been deported twice by the Trump administration: first to Honduras and then to Liberia,” he says. He was intercepted by police officers in July in New Orleans while he was picking up his wife from work. He ended up at the Jackson Parish Correctional center in Louisiana, and from there he was taken to Alexandria airport. He recalls that a handful of Cubans and Guatemalans panicked and began to rebel in the departure lounge. “At that moment, the ICE agents tied them up and held them like this,” he says, imitating a body immobilized almost from head to toe. “When I saw that, I started crying. I wondered what had happened to the U.S. that I used to know – a country where I felt free and safe to live and go out with my children.”

People who refused to disembark from the plane in Liberia were deported to Equatorial Guinea, including a Cuban man in a delicate state of health following a severe ventral hernia. Organizations that monitor deportations to third countries have denounced the serious human rights violations and abuses suffered by those deported to this country.

The details of the agreement

The first agreement between the U.S. and Liberia, signed in September 2025, is now the subject of a litigation regarding the Asylum Cooperation Agreements (ACA), since U.S. law establishes that an asylum seeker can only be sent to a third country if it is truly “safe” and offers a comprehensive and equitable asylum system. The second agreement, announced a few weeks ago, is in force.

Savi Arvey, director of Refugee and Immigrant Policy and Rights at Human Rights First, says Liberia lacks the capacity to process asylum claims. “This raises serious concerns that these refugees will be left in an indefinite limbo or subjected to chain expulsions, eventually being sent back to the same countries and conditions they fled,” she says.

The Trump administration has spent more than $40 million in U.S. taxpayer money to sign these agreements, according to a report released in February by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The pacts are generally opaque: the documents are not made public and hardly go beyond the details of what third countries gain by accepting detainees.

The agreements are signed under diplomatic and economic pressure. On the one hand, there is the threat of tariffs, sanctions, visa restrictions and the axing of funds to international organizations; on the other, there is the promise of aid and investment. Liberia is no exception.

After Boakai’s government announced in October last year that it would accept a Salvadoran citizen expelled from the United States, Washington extended the validity of business and tourist visas for Liberian citizens from 12 to 36 months. In December, they signed an agreement in which the United States committed to allocating $124 million to the Liberian health sector. That same month, the U.S.-backed company Ivanhoe Atlantic agreed to pay $1.8 billion for a five-year concession to transport iron ore along the Liberian rail corridor. And according to a New York Times investigation, in that same time frame the State Department agreed to provide the Liberian government with $5 million for the management of third-country nationals transferred from the United States, despite the fact that the Liberian government had previously stated that it had not received any compensation and that it was an agreement “for strictly humanitarian purposes.”

Yael Schacher, director of Refugees International for the Americas and Europe and co-director of Third Country Deportation Watch, stated that the strategy promoted by the current U.S. administration is an opaque and corrupt foreign policy where the money allocated is subjected to very little or no control, contrary to what is stated and signed in documents.

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