‘This is Africa, deal with it’: the lives of the migrants deported from the US to the Central African Republic

Still unable to believe everything he’s experiencing, Brayan Omar Sánchez leans out from the balcony of his room. He’s living at Maison Confort, an apartment complex in Lakouanga, a bustling, central neighborhood of Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.

Sánchez pauses to observe the place in awe. Everything is completely foreign to him; it’s as if he’s been transported to the ends of the Earth. He sees a woman walking with a basket on her head; he sees the rooftops of low houses with brick walls; he sees unpaved streets, with their reddish hue. The day he complained about the lack of water for bathing, a guard told him, “This is Africa, deal with it.”

The Central African Republic is slightly smaller than Texas, the state where U.S. authorities put him on a plane, handcuffed and shackled, on July 31. He thought it was a joke the first time an officer told him he was on the list for a deportation flight to Africa. “That seemed impossible to me,” he says.

He knew little about the African continent: he imagined it as a place far removed from the rest of the world (or at least from Olancho, the region where he was born in Honduras). If they had sent him to Ethiopia, Botswana, or Cameroon, it would have been all the same to him, because in his mind, Africa was “a very, very, very faraway place, with deserts, vicious animals, nasty diseases and languages I don’t speak.” It was the last place he thought he would end up when, on May 13, 2026, he left his home in the Miami neighborhood of Allapattah, early in the morning, only to be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

Since crossing the U.S.-Mexico border a decade ago, Sánchez, 31, had worked as a gardener and truck driver. He also operated a small pressure-washing business. He was always undocumented. Now, all of that seems to belong to a past life: he thinks about it as he paces back and forth in the Maison Confort apartment that he shares with another man. He’s trying to find an explanation for why he ended up in Bangui, as well as a way to get out.

The apartment where he’s staying has a kitchen (which he’s been told not to use), a bathroom and a small living room. There’s also a bedroom with two single beds and mosquito nets. “Here, the mosquitoes are just waiting for you to open the door,” he sighs, in a video call with EL PAÍS. He’s seen locals lighting fires in the street to scare them away. If there’s electricity, they turn on the air conditioning… but the truth is, most of the time, it’s dark.

He experienced the same darkness on the night of August 1, when they arrived at Bangui M’Poko International Airport. The plane was carrying some 80 migrants in total, hailing from Turkey, Romania, Afghanistan, Ecuador, Cuba and several African countries. They had all been deported from the United States.

With the $60 that he had managed to hide on his person, Sánchez asked an officer in Bangui to do him the favor of exchanging the money and buying him a phone. He called his wife in Miami, which is more than 6,500 miles away. There’s a five-hour time difference and the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean between them.

“I told her, ‘Honey, I’m free now, but they sent me to Africa.’”

Sánchez recalls that his wife was devastated.

The long journey to Africa

Sánchez was transferred to a unit with dozens of African migrants at the Prairieland Detention Center, located in Alvarado, a city southeast of Dallas, Texas. He began to feel suspicious. “I wondered why they were putting us [non-Africans] with those people, since it wasn’t usually like that. In the other [detention] centers, they kept us separate, because they have a different culture, their religion is different,” he says.

The first place where Sánchez was held was at the Krome North Service Processing Center, in Miami. Then, he spent two months in Denver, Colorado. On July 26, he was transferred to another detention center in Phoenix, Arizona. That was the first time he heard anyone mention the possibility of sending them to Africa. His last stop was in central Texas, the place where almost everyone who is about to be deported ends up.

“I thought they were going to send us to Mexico. I kept saying, ‘Mexico is fine, they speak our language, it’s not so bad,’” Sánchez remembers. He insists that he never signed a deportation order. At one point – when the officers at Prairieland handed him his documents and the shoes that he had crafted out of bags of potato chips and Doritos – Sánchez ventured to ask, “So, where are you sending us to?”

The officer replied, “To Africa.”

“Africa? No, I can’t go to Africa,” he said, frightened. At that point, he still thought there might be a mistake in the system.

The next day, at around six in the morning, they took him to the unit with the African migrants. “I was traumatized there, I didn’t sleep. I said, ‘Wow, this is real, they’re going to send me to Africa.’ I showered about 15 times to relax; my head was spinning,” he recalls. Later on, four Cubans arrived at that same unit, including 31-year-old Yasmani Noel Moreno de Armas and 37-year-old Arístides Fernández García. Sánchez heard them speaking Spanish. “I went up to them and asked what they were doing there… and they asked me the same thing. I told them that there were rumors they were going to send us to Africa.”

On the afternoon of July 29, an officer arrived to inform them that it wasn’t a rumor: they were headed for the other side of the world. “That’s the way the rules are: you’ll be deported to Africa tomorrow,” he warned. Sánchez questioned him: “But we haven’t signed anything?” The officer replied, “That doesn’t matter to us. We’re ICE – we’re the ones who deport people.” Sánchez spoke again: “But I have a pending asylum case.” And the officer answered, once more: “Your case is closed.”

The Honduran and the Cubans began to complain, declaring that there was no way they would get on the plane. The officer was adamant: “It doesn’t matter. We’re coming back tomorrow with guns. And, if you don’t get on, we’re going to beat you up. You’ve been warned.” Then, he walked away, laughing.

Around 10 a.m. the next morning, the armed officers arrived with riot shields. They handcuffed everyone. A migrant from Vietnam resisted: he was beaten. “That guy was asking for help, but we couldn’t help him. They were practically killing him; he was unconscious,” Sánchez recounts. They were taken to buses without being offered food or water. At around three in the afternoon, they were taken to the airport. And, after two hours, they boarded the plane through the back.

“A huge plane; I’d never seen one like it,” Sánchez notes. An officer, in a mocking tone, yelled at him, “Hey, Honduras, why are you going to Africa?” Sánchez was in shock: “My world came crashing down. They separated me from my family. It’s so hard.” He burst into tears.

It was the longest and saddest flight of their lives. It took about 22 hours to reach the Central African Republic, although they made layovers beforehand to drop off some migrants in Senegal and Nigeria. During all that time, each detainee was only given a bottle of water and some bread.

“They shackled our feet, hands and waists; we couldn’t even scratch our faces on the plane, or go to the bathroom,” García says. Until his deportation, he had been living in the United States with an I-220A – officially known as an Order of Release on Recognizance, when a person has been released from custody as their case goes to immigration court – which has prevented the legalization of more than 500,000 Cubans. Despite the fact that he hadn’t committed any crime, ICE officers detained him the day he appeared before a judge in a Miami immigration court back in January. He was subsequently locked up at the South Florida Detention Facility, colloquially known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

García vividly remembers the moment he crossed the border through Arizona, in 2022: “The officer told me, ‘Welcome to the United States; you’ve just arrived in a safe country.’” Today, the phrase seems like a joke.

He’s taking stock of the current situation: “I start thinking and I wonder: ‘what’s happening with us Cubans?’” García asks himself. “I had a trucking company, I paid taxes, I never got a traffic ticket. I did everything right. I left a dictatorship only to enter into a [form of] terrorism. I never thought they were going to send me to Africa; I thought that was impossible. I’m not a terrorist, I’m not a criminal.”

The plane carrying the deportees landed on the night of August 1, in Bangui. “The first thing I saw was that there was no light anywhere,” García recalls. The local authorities made them get off the aircraft, took them to a tent and gave them all injections. “Without telling us anything, they injected us; until now, I don’t know what they injected us with,” he says. They put them on a bus, driving them in the darkness to Maison Confort.

Bangui residents have already noticed that there are new people in the area – people who don’t look like them, who don’t speak Sangho or French. The children greet them with curiosity, although there are some adults who have looked at them with suspicion. “They have no idea who we are,” Yasmani Noel Moreno de Armas shrugs. He’s a 31-year-old Cuban. When he called his parents, who live in Hialeah, in Miami-Dade County, to tell them that he was in Africa, they started screaming. “They went crazy, crying and yelling,” he sighs.

On May 11, 2025, he went to relax in West Palm Beach. Suddenly, without offering an explanation, ICE officers detained him. He says he’s still traumatized by the incident. “I thought they were going to take me to Cuba. I only realized [that I was headed] for Africa when I had been on the plane for more than two hours.”

The flight that arrived in Bangui on the night of August 1 was the second to land with deportees from the United States in less than two months, after the governments of both countries signed a deportation agreement that – according to what has emerged – amounts to $81 million. On the night of June 12, a Boeing 767 left Alexandria International Airport in Louisiana, loaded with more than 20 migrants (although the exact number of those deported to the Central African Republic is still unknown).

The U.S. government itself has issued a travel alert, so that American citizens don’t set foot in the Central African Republic. According to the State Department, there are risks due to “unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health [issues] and terrorism.” And yet, the CAR is the most recent of the African nations to join the list of third country destinations for migrants from the United States. Across the continent, countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Eswatini, or Equatorial Guinea have already accepted deportees. In recent months, the governments have charged multi-million-dollar sums in exchange for receiving migrants.

EL PAÍS contacted the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to find out the selection criteria for sending migrants to Africa and what would their legal status be in the Central African Republic. However, the agency limited itself to responding that these questions would be referred to the State Department.

Everything is very strange and unfamiliar to these migrants right now. To start their lives in the CAR, they were each given two shirts – one yellow and one gray – a pair of pants and flip-flops. They’re forbidden from leaving the hotel. When they have left, over the couple of weeks that they’ve been there, it’s because they pay the guards to take them to the corner store or the barbershop, using the money that their families have started sending them.

De Armas needed a haircut, but the barber didn’t understand what he wanted. Communication is impossible: he had to show him a picture of the style. He and García were taken to the hospital… but they didn’t know what to say to the doctors. They haven’t stopped having stomach problems because of the food, or allergies due to the changing weather.

They all say that they’re shocked by the state of Bangui. “The hospital was like in Cuba, just as dilapidated. It’s worse than Cuba,” De Armas laments.

The passing days have brought about a feeling of utter helplessness. They don’t know how to get out of this situation. Who can they complain to? What’s the next step? How long will they be kept locked up in their current accommodations? What will become of them?

“They brought us here illegally,” De Armas affirms. “What am I going to do here? [Probably] hang myself, because there’s nothing else for me.” Sometimes, they think it wouldn’t have been the same if they had been sent to a Latin American country, somewhere even remotely resembling where they’re originally from. For now, they haven’t even been given identification cards, or a visa that would allow them to stay legally. They can barely sleep. They’re incredibly anxious. And, at times, they even feel afraid.

“It all happened without our consent, by force. We were kidnapped,” Sánchez points out. “It’s a thousand times better to be in [Honduras] than here. I would never have agreed to this.”

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Still, they all share the same certainty: they don’t know how, but they’ll do everything possible to leave Bangui. In the middle of their dark night, they want the world to rise for them.