Around 15 people deported from the United States arrived in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, on Friday, April 17, under the terms of an agreement between the Trump administration and the Congolese government that has drawn sharp criticism from human rights organisations who say it exposes vulnerable migrants to serious harm. The deportees, who are originally from Latin American countries, landed in Kinshasa after spending months in US immigration detention fighting legal attempts to return them to their home nations.
Under US law, the deportees had received orders from American judges preventing their return to their countries of origin on grounds that doing so would expose them to danger. Rather than releasing them or finding other legal channels, the Trump administration appears to have used a bilateral agreement with Congo as a mechanism to remove people whose legal status prevented their direct repatriation. The deportees will remain in Congo on what US officials described as a temporary basis, though the arrangement’s long-term implications for those involved remain deeply unclear.
The International Organisation for Migration has offered what it calls “assisted voluntary return” to the deportees — a process that human rights lawyers describe as deeply troubling given that the individuals in question fought specifically to avoid being returned anywhere they did not choose to go. A US attorney familiar with the case described the arrangement as alarming. The deportees, many of whom spent years building lives in the United States, now find themselves in a country they may have never visited, with limited resources and uncertain legal status.
The agreement with Congo is one of at least seven similar deals the Trump administration has negotiated with African nations as part of a broader strategy to accelerate the removal of migrants from the United States. The approach has been criticised by human rights organisations who say it amounts to using African countries as holding facilities for migrants whom the US government does not wish to deport to their homes but also does not wish to allow to remain in the United States. African governments entering these agreements have faced their own domestic criticism, with opponents arguing that accepting deportees carries financial and security risks that outweigh any diplomatic benefits.
For the individuals involved, the experience of being removed to a country that is not their own after years in the US immigration system represents a particularly brutal outcome. Many of those deported under such arrangements have families in the United States — including American citizen children — whose lives are profoundly disrupted by a parent’s removal to an unexpected destination. Human rights groups say the growing use of third-country deportation agreements represents a concerning erosion of international protections for asylum seekers and migrants whose legal status is in dispute.
Sources: Africanews (April 17, 2026), Reuters (April 14, 2026), BBC Africa, Al Jazeera