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For the first few hours of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight over the Atlantic Ocean, Mohamed Barry continued to act like himself, which is to say, he expected to be visible to the people around him.
So as GEO Group flight security guards stood over him and the other shackled passengers, chatting casually with each other, he asked them what country he was going to be deported to. They didn’t answer.
When the guards started drinking from red and blue plastic cups and the smell of alcohol wafted over to his seat, he asked one of them point-blank, “Are you guys allowed to drink on the job?” No response.
Then a man from Eritrea or Somalia, Barry isn’t sure which, began to beg the guards to let him use the lavatory. Barry chimed in with an appeal to decency, telling the guards, “Please consider us as human beings.” But the guards were boisterous by that point, he said, and they didn’t appreciate the man’s increasingly loud and desperate pleas crashing their party.
Barry watched as a guard turned and looked at the man dead in the face and said, “You. Can pee on. You.” Another guard laughed.
“After seeing that, I just kept my head down,” Barry, 52, told me over the phone last week.
Returning detainees to their countries of origin, despite their having protection orders barring this, is illegal under U.S. and international law.
Barry was among an estimated 71 people expelled to countries where they had no ties on a July 31 Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight—more than any other known third-country removal flight to Africa. On the 26-hour flight, which made stops in Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, and Ghana, Barry and other passengers say ICE-contracted guards subjected them to verbal and physical abuse, tied at least two of them in full-body straitjackets, and refused to let them use the lavatory. Barry also said he witnessed an ICE agent tell a foreign official to return them to their countries of origin, despite all having protection orders barring this—a practice called chain refoulement that is illegal under U.S. and international law.
ICE and GEO Group did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the allegations in this story. A Department of Homeland Security representative who did not identify themselves also did not answer the questions but replied with an unrelated line they’ve sent for two other recent stories: “For operational security purposes, we would never confirm the location of an airplane.”
A native of Guinea who had been in the United States for 25 years and has five U.S. citizen children, Barry is now in hiding in another West African country, with no ID and a waning supply of his heart medication.
“To be honest, my life is completely upside down,” he said. “I think what America did to me is wrong.”
I FIRST HEARD ABOUT THIS FLIGHT on July 29, a day before it took off on July 30, from immigration attorney Keith Hilzendeger, whose client, a 19-year-old asylum seeker from Nepal, had been told he was going to be removed to the Central African Republic, an isolated and impoverished country that has been in a near-constant state of civil war for more than a decade. A motion for a temporary stay had just been denied, Hilzendeger told me, but he’d filed an appeal. Could I scan public flight data and see if any ICE charter planes were near the Dallas-area ICE camp where his client had been moved a few days earlier?
Unfortunately, there was one, an Eastern Airlines Boeing 767 parked at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport. For at least a decade, the only large-jet charter airline that would do ICE removals to Africa was Omni Air International, but flight data shows its ICE activity dropped off earlier this summer, about the same time that its parent company—private equity firm Stonepeak—started getting some bad press that could have affected its bottom line. Eastern seemed poised to take over this corner of ICE’s route map, having done its first Africa ICE flight two months earlier.
The morning after the message from Hilzendeger, the plane was still parked in Fort Worth. But late that afternoon, I got another message, this time from an activist trying to help someone who’d been told they would be sent to Ghana. Had I seen any ICE planes in the Dallas area?
Just after 5 p.m. Texas time, Hilzendeger told me his appeal had been rejected. The plane took off about 40 minutes later.
Few of the other passengers on board had any idea where they would end up. Aristides Fernandez Garcia, a 37-year-old Cuban asylum seeker who spoke to Memo Torres at L.A. Taco earlier this month, said he and five other men from Cuba, Ecuador, and Honduras didn’t even know they were going to the continent of Africa until the end of the boarding process, when an armed guard saw them and asked, “What are you doing on this flight? They don’t sell baleadas [thick tortillas] in Africa.” They thought he was joking.
Ten third-country nationals from West African countries would end up in Sierra Leone, and another 30 would end up in Ghana. Everyone else was forced off the plane in the Central African Republic. That includes men and women from Cameroon, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Nepal, Russia, Somalia, Serbia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam, along with the men from Cuba, Ecuador, and Honduras, according to Third Country Deportation Watch.
Barry had known ICE planned to send him to a third country from the moment he was captured outside his home in Brownsburg, Indiana, on July 1, because the Border Patrol agents who handcuffed him told him so. But in the month he’d been detained, no one ever told him which country. He never saw a judge, he said, and every time he scheduled an appointment with his attorney, he’d be moved to a camp in another state.
Hiding detainees from legal counsel appears to be one of the purposes of ICE’s ever-expanding network of charter planes, prison buses, and rented vehicles, as the Prospect reported last October.
“Every person held in ICE custody has a right to talk to their lawyer. However, actually having that right work in practice can be difficult,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. “Scheduling appointments at detention centers can take multiple days, and when ICE has the ability to bounce people from one place to another in a matter of hours, that can make it practically impossible.”
Barry came to the United States in 2001 in his mid-twenties, fleeing persecution in Guinea due to his political affiliation. His asylum claim was eventually rejected—he told me this was only due to his paperwork being incomplete because the Guinean government refused to issue identification for him—but in 2007, he was granted the next best thing: a withholding of removal order. This meant he’d proven he was a refugee and could not be deported to his country of origin. Back then, that also meant that he wouldn’t be deported at all.
Though the order did not give Barry a path to citizenship, it did allow him to live and work in the U.S. indefinitely. “The judge said, ‘Mr. Barry, this can guarantee you being in America. As long as you don’t commit a crime, you can stay here,’” he remembered.
In his 25 years in the U.S., Barry told me he never got so much as a parking or speeding ticket, a notable achievement considering he became a commercial truck driver. He married in 2004 while his case was still pending, and he and his wife eventually had five children together. Their youngest, a daughter, is nine years old.
In April, Indiana revoked the commercial driver’s licenses of all immigrants with anything less than a green card, and Barry’s longtime employer was forced to let him go. Heart and kidney problems he’d been dealing with for a while suddenly got worse. His doctor had upped his medications and was still watching him closely, running tests, trying to figure out what was wrong, when Border Patrol pulled him over early one morning as he drove away from his house toward his temp job.
As the agents drove him to the Clay County Sheriff’s Office, he remembered one of them telling him, “I know it’s not right. I know you’ve been here a long time, but I have to do this.”
MY CALL WITH BARRY LASTED for about an hour and a half, but in that time I was impressed by his remarkable and detailed memory. As he relayed the story of his life and its sudden turn for the worse, whenever he introduced a new name, he would stop to spell it out. He remembered the make and model of every vehicle that transported him from one ICE camp to another over the next four weeks, every charter airline he was shackled and loaded onto, and the number of people on board.
It is nearly impossible to fact-check or corroborate someone’s account of their removal flight. ICE doesn’t volunteer this information. Deportees who shared a flight and little else can be difficult to track down. And often, memories are blurry from the trauma of it all.
Not so with Barry. His memories were horrifyingly clear, and the few things he told me that I could independently verify, like the nationalities of most of the other passengers, checked out.
So this is what he said happened on his removal flight, as it made its way from Fort Worth to its final destination in Ghana:
A Vietnamese man was beaten on the tarmac in Fort Worth when he refused to get on the plane. Another man, who was shouting, “This is not right!” and “political things” during the flight, was knocked against his seat, dragged to the back of the plane, and put into the full-body straitjacket known as “the WRAP.” Guards stood over him and laughed. He doesn’t know when the man was let out of the WRAP, but he saw that he was back in his shackles by the time they got to Ghana. (All adult passengers on ICE flights are shackled and the ankles and wrists tied to a waist chain.)
Most of the guards were drinking alcohol from red and blue cups and laughing at the detainees. (Another passenger on the flight who did not want to be identified confirmed this.) If anyone stood up to use the lavatory, the guards swarmed them and shouted at them, “Get down now!” An older guard who was not drinking said this was going to be his last ICE flight, because he was going to quit.
The flight medic was repeatedly summoned to check on a man from Maryland, who had gotten a concussion a few days earlier when the driver of an ICE vehicle braked suddenly. The man kept passing out. He was shaking uncontrollably and saying his head hurt. The flight medic told him there wasn’t much he could do.
At the stop in Sierra Leone, a Sierra Leonean man tried to disembark, but he was told no, he had withholding of removal, so he had to transit through Ghana—meaning he had to stay shackled on the plane for ten more hours.
Two of the women in the Ghana group were also from Maryland; one said she was a nurse who had been in the U.S. for 25 years, and that ICE took her in front of her kids. Another woman said ICE got her at the airport as she was boarding a flight to go to her son’s graduation from a military academy.
They arrived in Ghana late at night, and 30 of them were put onto two or three buses. There was an argument between the ICE agents and Ghanaian military officials over paperwork, and Barry heard an ICE agent yell, “We don’t go by your list.”
A Ghanaian official came onto the bus and said, “Who’s in here that’s going to Nigeria?” The Nigerians, who all had withholding of removal or similar protections, were taken to a plane waiting to fly them to Nigeria. Then they did the same for people from the Ivory Coast.
There were 12 left, eight men and four women. Before the ICE agent left, Barry told me he heard the man say, “Take them all to their home countries.”
Now this is important, and I asked Barry a few times if he was sure. It is illegal for the U.S. government to deport someone to a country if they know the person will just be sent to another country where they may face persecution. This is chain refoulement, and much of the Trump administration’s third-country removal system hinges on them being able to claim that third countries promised not to chain refoule, and then pretending they aren’t aware of all the evidence to the contrary.
“As described, that would be unlawful,” Reichlin-Melnick from the American Immigration Council said when I told him about this. “What that interaction does is it pierces the veil of legal fictions that ICE is engaged in.” ICE and the State Department have repeatedly claimed that third countries have sworn in writing to not send anyone back to somewhere where they would be persecuted or tortured. “What that shows in practice is that the United States knows those assurances aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, and that the U.S. government and ICE in particular is actively engaged in chain refoulement through the means of intermediaries,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
The remaining 12 were taken to Kingsbridge Royale Hotel, where they were imprisoned under armed guard. Barry told me the names (and spelling) of the officers who brought them food and could be bribed into getting them cellphones, but I’m not repeating them here because people sent to Ghana in the future may need officers who bring them food and can be bribed into getting them cellphones. All of the officers, even the helpful ones, made it clear that the prisoners were not welcome to stay, Barry said.
After three days, he agreed to go back to Guinea. On the flight, he was given a temporary travel document that he doesn’t think was legitimate, which he took a picture of before it was taken from him on arrival. Through a friend of a friend, he’d arranged to be picked up by someone who took him to a safe house for a few hours. Close to dawn, someone drove him to the border, where he bribed his way into another country.
When I talked to him last week, he was sleeping on a pile of cardboard boxes in a shop whose owner let him stay there at night. He had acquired a blanket and used his sneakers as a pillow. ICE never got his medications right, but they did give him a couple of weeks’ worth of at least some of them when he got off the plane. He’s taking half as much as he’s supposed to every day, while he tries to figure out how to get a prescription without any ID. When he went silent for a few days, I got worried, but friends back in Indiana let me know he was OK, he just didn’t have that phone anymore.
Barry doesn’t know where to go from here. The country he’s in is unfamiliar, and he’s not authorized to be there. If he goes back to Guinea, he’s certain he’ll be imprisoned and tortured. And he still has a mortgage to pay on the family home he can’t go home to.
“I can’t tell you how heartbroken I am leaving my younger girls,” Barry told me. “I’m the one who takes them to the bus stop.”
HILZENDEGER, THE ATTORNEY who first told me about the flight, hasn’t heard from his Nepalese client since he arrived in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, a month ago. His client doesn’t speak any English—the entire 18 months he spent in the U.S., he was in ICE camps—or, presumably, French, the lingua franca in Bangui.
“I’m afraid of him being refouled to Nepal. I’m afraid how the government in CAR might treat him,” Hilzendeger says.
Eastern Airlines has continued its expansion into Africa. On August 19, an Eastern jet delivered 20 people from all over the world to Liberia, which I wrote about for the Prospect. When five people refused to leave the plane, it flew to Equatorial Guinea, where they were forced off of it. They are now imprisoned in a hotel owned by that country’s dictator with dozens of other third-country nationals.
On August 27, an Eastern jet made third-country removal stops in Eswatini, Burundi, and Rwanda. The next day, another Eastern jet took off from Fort Worth, headed for Africa.
