At least 40 migrants who received legal protection in the United States after facing persecution over their LGBT status have been deported to African countries where same-sex relationships are criminalised or LGBT people face documented abuses, a Reuters investigation has found.
One of them is Abdou Latifou, a Togolese man who fled his country after a mob assaulted him and threatened to kill him after he was seen kissing a man he loved.
Latifou sought refuge in the United States, but in June, he was placed on a US deportation flight to Sierra Leone, where gay men can face life imprisonment under colonial-era laws.
The deportation was part of the Trump administration’s expanding policy of sending migrants to third countries rather than their countries of origin. Reuters documented the cases of 40 migrants, including people from Africa, Iraq, Jamaica and Russia, through interviews with deportees and immigration lawyers and a review of hundreds of pages of legal documents.
Sixteen of the 40 migrants remain in the countries to which they were deported, with some still detained, while another 16, including Latifou, were eventually repatriated to their home countries against their will. Nine others are in hiding in third countries, while the whereabouts of one Ghanaian man are unknown.
Sending people “to a third country where they face the very persecution we recognized makes a mockery of our protection systems,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior US immigration official.
The Department of Homeland Security, however, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not enforce immigration laws based on sexual orientation.
“Third country removals are an essential public safety tool,” DHS spokesman Chandler Rebel said.
Third-country deportations were rare before President Donald Trump returned to office, but more than 40,000 people have since been deported to countries other than their own by ICE and Border Patrol, according to preliminary government data shared with Reuters. About 900 of those deportations involved African countries.
In February, US District Judge Brian Murphy highlighted the risks faced by LGBT people in a case challenging the policy, describing the government’s argument that deportees had not specifically requested protection from every possible third country as an “absurdity.”
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday put a hold on Murphy’s ruling, allowing the Trump administration to continue third-country deportations while it prepares to hear arguments in December.
Reuters found that the 40 documented cases involved deportations to Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Eswatini, all of which criminalise same-sex sexual acts.
The cases also included deportations to the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the US State Department has previously documented abuses against LGBT people, including “corrective rape” and conversion therapy.
Bridget Crawford, director of law and policy at LGBT advocacy group Immigration Equality, said the United States had repeatedly granted asylum to LGBT people from some of the same countries.
However, more than half of those documented by Reuters, including Latifou, were ineligible for asylum because they had not applied for it in countries they passed through before entering the United States illegally. The restriction stemmed from Biden-era asylum rules that were vacated by a federal court in May.
In Latifou’s case, a judge granted him a lesser form of protection that barred his removal to Togo but permitted his deportation to another country.
After arriving in Sierra Leone, Latifou said he was held for two weeks in a hotel under police surveillance before being placed on a flight back to Togo.
He returned with only a few items of clothing and $100.
After visiting his mother in his village, a relative warned him that he was still in danger and helped him cross into Benin. He later travelled to Ivory Coast, where he now lives with a friend and works as a security guard.
Although same-sex relationships are not illegal in Ivory Coast, Latifou said he avoids the Togolese community because he fears being recognised.
Rebel said ICE is no longer responsible for migrants once they are no longer in its custody.
Several deportees interviewed by Reuters said they were forced to seek refuge wherever they could find safety.
A bisexual Ghanaian woman deported to Cameroon in January spent seven months there before moving to northern Nigeria to live with a relative.
She said she could not speak French, the main local language, and feared returning to Ghana. In northern Nigeria, however, penalties for same-sex sexual acts can include flogging or death by stoning.
She said she now spends most days indoors because of fears for her safety.
A gay Ghanaian man who was deported to Sierra Leone and later forcibly returned to Ghana has spent four months hiding in forests in neighbouring Togo.
He said he survives on small amounts of money sent by his mother and often sleeps on a blanket on the ground, taking shelter in an abandoned, unfinished building when it rains.
A 44-year-old Mauritanian man who had lived in the United States for more than a decade was detained by ICE in January and deported to Eswatini, a country he had never previously heard of.
He said he spent about six weeks in a prison without hot water and infested with mosquitoes before agreeing to return to Mauritania.
He later crossed into Senegal, where the maximum penalty for same-sex sexual acts has recently been doubled.
Now living with relatives in a remote town, he is seeking information about countries in Europe or Asia that might accept him.
“My life just got turned upside down,” he said.
Boluwatife Enome
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