“Hey, Honduras, why are you going to Africa?” an officer said to Bryan Omar Sánchez with a laugh on July 29, when neither his cries, his protests nor the fact that he had not given consent prevented him from being deported to the Central African Republic.
Almost two months after his expulsion, a federal judge has ordered the United States government to return Sánchez, release him and respect due process. If the Honduran man returns to his home in Colorado, he will be the first person returned out of the dozens of migrants sent to Africa by force after agreements were signed with nearly 14 countries on the continent.
“This court and many others across the country have determined that ICE’s policies of expelling people to third countries violate the constitutional right to due process when applicants are not given notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal before being transferred to a third country,” Judge Regina M. Rodríguez said in a federal court order dated September 18 before the United States District Court for Colorado.
Sánchez arrived in the United States a decade ago after crossing the border, and since then he had worked as a gardener and truck driver. Lately he ran a small pressure-washing business. After he was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and taken to a Colorado detention center this past May, his lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition. Still, Sánchez was moved to a unit housing dozens of African migrants at the Prairieland detention center in Alvarado, southeast of Dallas, Texas. He was later taken to another facility in Phoenix, Arizona.
“There I thought they were going to send us to Mexico,” Sánchez told EL PAÍS a few days after arriving at Maison Confort, an apartment lodging in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. “I thought: ‘Mexico is fine, they speak our language, it’s not bad.’” But when the Honduran man asked where they were being sent, the center official replied: to Africa. “Africa? No, I can’t go to Africa,” he told them.
Sánchez told ICE authorities he had not signed consent to be deported to that continent, that he had an asylum application pending in the U.S. immigration system and that he even had protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). Despite his pleas, he found himself on a flight with dozens of migrants of other nationalities, and after nearly 22 hours of travel he arrived in the Central African Republic.
In the court order addressing his case, the judge states that “all removals to third countries, that is, removal to a country other than the country or countries designated during the immigration proceedings as the country of removal in the noncitizen’s removal order, must be preceded by written notice to both the noncitizen and their attorney in a language the noncitizen can understand.”
EL PAÍS has interviewed nearly a dozen migrants in the Central African Republic, Liberia and Equatorial Guinea, and all of them confirmed they were deported without signing an authorization, and even learned they were being sent to Africa only after they had been in flight for several hours.
Now Judge Regina M. Rodríguez ordered not only Martínez’s return from the Central African Republic to the District of Colorado but that, once there, he be released immediately, along with all his personal belongings, “without onerous conditions on his release,” such as GPS monitoring, periodic check-ins or other restrictions on his freedom of movement.
The magistrate also demanded that Martínez not be re-detained “unless they prove, by clear and convincing evidence in a pre-deprivation hearing before an impartial judge, that there is a risk of flight or danger to the community.”
A call to end deportations to third countries
On March 15, 2025, when dozens of Venezuelans arrived at the massive Salvadoran prison CECOT, the U.S. government opened a new chapter in its migration policy: deportations to third countries, which have led to diplomatic agreements with at least 35 nations worldwide. According to the group Third Country Deportation Watch, more than 23,000 people have been deported in operations in which the U.S. government has spent over $49 million.
“These illegal deportations to third countries are part of the broader efforts by the Trump administration to undermine the global protection system and make countries around the world complicit in its campaign of mass deportations, which openly disregard due process and separate families,” said Savi Arvey, policy director for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First, an organization tracking these deportations.
Once in these countries, many people have reported being victims of kidnapping and violence. They say they face a lack of care and remain in a legal limbo, without identification or the ability to apply for asylum or refuge.
The situation has escalated to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, where on September 18 three judges upheld the ruling of U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy, who on prior occasions has opposed deporting migrants to third countries without respecting due process. The current ruling states that the Trump administration cannot send a person to a third country without prior notice, thereby overturning a Department of Homeland Security policy that allowed this type of rapid removal.
“A person’s right to challenge their removal to a country on the basis of fear of persecution in that country means little if they do not receive prior notice of the intended destination for removal and a meaningful opportunity to contest that destination,” Circuit Judge Seth Aframe wrote.
Although the Trump administration is expected to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, the ruling against deportations to third countries brings hope for many who have been sent to completely unfamiliar places over the past nearly two years and who remain in a state of uncertainty.
“International human rights law does not allow states to create a protection vacuum of this kind,” Michael Gyan Nyarko, deputy executive director of the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA), told EL PAÍS. “A person cannot be moved from one jurisdiction to another until, eventually, no state is willing to accept responsibility for protecting the rights international law guarantees that person.” Nyarko’s main concern, he said, is whether these deportations to third countries “are being used in practice to indirectly achieve what the law prohibited the United States from doing directly.”
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
