Imagine being told you’re being sent to a country you’ve never heard of—a place thousands of miles from everything familiar, where they speak languages you don’t understand and the water makes you sick. That’s the reality for a group of 15 men and women from Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador who, after years of building lives in the United States, suddenly found themselves on a plane to the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are the first test case of a controversial Trump administration policy: deporting non-citizens to so-called “third countries” that have agreed to take them in—countries that often have little connection to the deportees’ own histories or legal cases.
‘I thought they were just threats’
Jorge Cubillos had spent eight years in Florida, legally working, raising four children, and living under protection from deportation granted by a US court under the UN Convention Against Torture. He fled Colombia after receiving death threats. But last month, immigration agents told him he was being removed. His destination? Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, a nation twice the size of Texas that is in the grip of a decades-long conflict—albeit on the other side of the country, around 1,700 miles away. “I never thought they’d actually send me to Africa,” Cubillos told a BBC reporter from his hotel room. “I didn’t even know where DR Congo was.”
A legal loophole or a humanitarian crisis?
The US government defends these deportations as lawful, pointing to bilateral agreements with countries like Ghana, South Sudan, and now the DRC. But legal experts are raising alarms. Hubert Tshiswaka, a Congolese human rights lawyer and director of the Human Rights Research Institute, says the arrangement violates international refugee protections. “There is no legal basis to bring people from other countries to the Congo, especially from the United States,” he argues. The DRC government counters that it is acting out of “international solidarity,” and that the US is footing the bill for the migrants’ temporary stay—including their accommodation in a mid-range hotel near the airport, complete with a swimming pool and a tennis court. But to the deportees, that amenity is a cruel illusion. “We’ve used the pool once,” Cubillos says. “Most of the time, we’re stuck in our rooms, sick, with nothing to do.”
From handcuffs to ‘nowhere to go’
Marta (a pseudonym she uses to avoid reprisals) was living in Texas under a supervision order after a long legal battle. She had spent 14 months in detention but had never been accused of any crime except immigration violations. One day, ICE agents arrived at her home to install a GPS monitor—then handcuffed her instead. “They locked me in a room. They didn’t give me food or water,” she recalls. Two days later, after being vaccinated for yellow fever, she was on a 25-hour flight, restrained at the waist, hands, and feet, with only a paper bag containing an apple and chips. Now she’s in Kinshasa, where the main languages are French and Lingala. “We feel completely adrift,” she says. “Our human rights have been violated.”
Broader context: The third-country deportation experiment
This is not an isolated case. The Trump administration has expanded the use of “third-country” deportations as part of its aggressive push to fulfill campaign promises of mass removals. But the DRC deportations stand out because of the sheer distance and cultural dislocation involved. Many of these migrants had pending asylum applications or active court orders protecting them from return to their home countries. Sending them to a nation where they have no ties, no language, and no legal status raises profound questions about due process. A federal judge recently ordered the return of one woman sent to the DRC, calling her deportation “likely illegal.” Yet the policy continues.
Inside the hotel: A gilded cage in a poor neighborhood
The hotel where the deportees are staying sits in the Mikindo district, one of the poorest parts of Kinshasa. Armed police guard the entrance. The BBC was denied entry. But a staff member who spoke with reporters described the migrants as “good people” who are “just like our own citizens trying to make a living.” The deportees say they are free to leave the premises, but in practice, they have only ventured out a few times, accompanied by security guards, to see the city or shop. “There’s nowhere to go anyway,” one of them says. The conditions have taken a physical toll: frequent power cuts, no drinking water, bouts of fever, vomiting, and diarrhea that the hotel staff dismiss as “adapting to Africa.”
Original insight: The politics of visibility and invisibility
What makes this story particularly chilling is the way it exploits a legal and geographical loophole that renders the deportees invisible to the systems that once protected them. Immigration courts in the US are overburdened, and third-country agreements allow the government to bypass conventional deportation chains. But for the individuals involved, this is not a bureaucratic shortcut—it’s a life sentence of stateless limbo. They are neither in the US nor in their home countries, but in a place that was never part of their story. The DRC, already struggling with internal conflict and displacement of millions of its own citizens, becomes an unwilling host to a human logistics problem the US can’t solve. Meanwhile, online misinformation paints the deportees as criminals, even though they have no criminal records. They are caught between policy, prejudice, and the plain lack of a map that bears their destination. As Marta puts it, “How do I feel now? I feel that our human rights have been violated.” And then, in a moment of dark irony: “Here I am, in the Congo.”
