--- title: "A U.S. judge said Mali was unsafe for him, so the U.S. sent him to Ghana, which sent him to Mali" description: "His DHS bag tags already read “Mali.” The department blames contractors and a “clerical error”; 17 of 19 deportees reached tell similar stories" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-25T23:00:15Z modified: 2026-10-26T01:13:29Z url: https://rews.cc/a/a-u-s-judge-said-mali-was-unsafe-for-him-so-the-u-s-sent-him-534074 language: en tags: ["immigration", "trump", "mali", "ghana", "deportation", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # A U.S. judge said Mali was unsafe for him, so the U.S. sent him to Ghana, which sent him to Mali *His DHS bag tags already read “Mali.” The department blames contractors and a “clerical error”; 17 of 19 deportees reached tell similar stories* By Nate Ledger · October 25, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-u-s-judge-said-mali-was-unsafe-for-him-so-the-u-s-sent-him-534074 ## In brief - Moussa Diawara, a Malian man in Texas protected from removal to Mali since 2012, was arrested by ICE on July 11 - He was deported to Ghana on July 31 and says Ghanaian officials then forced him onto a flight to Mali - His DHS bag tags and a medical form listed Mali as the destination; DHS blamed contractors and a clerical error - 17 of 19 deportees reached by 60 Minutes said Ghana sent them to countries U.S. judges had barred - 62% of the 63 people on Diawara’s flight had no criminal record, according to a 60 Minutes review Moussa Diawara is 57. He is from Mali and has lived in the United States for nearly half his life, mostly in suburban Houston, where he has a wife and two children who are U.S. citizens. He came at 32 on a tourist visa and overstayed it. Then he applied for protection on the grounds that he had converted to Christianity, and that Mali, a Muslim-majority country with an Islamist insurgency, was a bad place to be a convert. In 2012 an immigration judge agreed. He has no criminal record. He drove for Uber. These days he talks to his son from a country he asked not to have named, and reminds him to vacuum the carpet every week. [As *60 Minutes* reported](https://cbsnews.com/news/moussa-diawara-third-country-deportation-ghana-mali-60-minutes/) for CBS News, ICE agents were waiting at his house on July 11 when he came home from a night shift. He was held for three weeks in Texas without being able to talk to his lawyer or a judge. On July 31 he was deported to Ghana, where he had never been and knew nobody. Within days, he says, Ghanaian officials put him on a flight to Mali against his will. They left him there without money or identification. “I still say to myself, ‘This isn’t real,’” he said. ## How the rule is supposed to work What the 2012 judge granted Diawara is called “withholding of removal.” It is an odd, narrow sort of protection. It does not say you may stay. It says the government can deport you, but not to the particular country where you would probably be persecuted. Basically it is a list of places you can’t be sent, and the government keeps the right to find you a safe alternative. In the past that right was rarely used for people like Diawara, since finding a country that will take a stranger is hard, so they tended to stay, get work permits and pay taxes, which is exactly what he did. The Trump administration has made the alternative easy by paying for it. According to CBS, ICE has deported 25,000 people to dozens of third countries, which in return get millions of dollars in aid or other benefits. A [Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democratic report](https://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/dem/release/ranking-member-shaheen-major-new-report-on-true-cost-of-trump-administrations-third-country-deportation-deals) released in February, commissioned by ranking member Jeanne Shaheen, looked at the deals through January 2026. It found the government had spent at least $40 million to deport roughly 300 people, [the AP reported](https://www.local10.com/news/national/2026/02/13/us-spent-40-million-on-roughly-300-deportations-to-third-nations-democratic-report-finds/). That works out to something over $130,000 a head, and the report’s \[executive summary\](https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Executive Summary\_At What Cost - Inside the Trump Administration’s Secret Deportation Deals\_SFRC Minority Report\_2026.pdf) says the bill sometimes ran past $1 million per person. It also says some migrants were flown thousands of miles only to be returned to their home countries, which the taxpayer also paid for. That is the catch. If the third country quietly sends people on to their home countries, the U.S. has paid Ghana to do the one thing an American judge said the U.S. could not do. The judge’s order binds the U.S. It does not bind Accra. ## The bag tags Diawara thinks the U.S. knew what would happen, and he has paperwork. On the flight to Ghana, U.S. officials handed him a medical document listing the destination as “SHRC Mali.” SHRC stands for Special High Risk Charter, the kind of flight he was on. Both bag tags issued by the Department of Homeland Security also said Mali. “So they know 100% I’m going to Mali,” he said. James Percival, DHS’s top lawyer, told *60 Minutes*: “Well, he wasn’t flown to Mali. He was flown to Ghana, but I can’t speak to why that piece of paper says that.” A department spokesperson later explained that the bag tags were “produced by contractors” who “are not part of the process that determines...the destination,” and that the medication form was a “clerical error.” I suppose that’s possible. It is a very specific clerical error, though, since the contractor printing the luggage tags apparently guessed the final destination correctly. DHS says Ghana gave “diplomatic assurances” for Diawara’s safety, and it also questioned whether his fear of persecution was credible. Ghana’s government declined to comment. Diawara was not an isolated case. His flight carried 63 people. It left Texas on July 30 and stopped in Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic before Ghana. Dozens of the passengers had withholding orders. *60 Minutes* reached 19 of the people left in Ghana, and 17 of them, about 89%, said they were then sent against their will to countries U.S. judges had ruled out, including Niger, Mali, Nigeria, Gambia and Guinea. Last year Ghanaian officials were filmed dragging Rabbiatu Kuyateh, a nurse who had lived in the U.S. for 30 years and also had a withholding order, onto a flight to Sierra Leone. Percival says he knows of no case where Ghana sent anyone onward against their will. He offered two other explanations: “Either they would choose to go home, and they might not always be truthful about the fact that they consented, so that’s one possibility. The other possibility is that the foreign government applied their own procedures and, consistent with international law, determined that it was acceptable to return them home.” The second explanation is really just a description of what the deportees say happened, with “consistent with international law” added at the end. Immigration attorney Meredyth Yoon says U.S. officials cannot fail to know, because they were warned in a lawsuit last year. In that case a federal judge, Tanya Chutkan, wrote that she was “alarmed and dismayed” by how the removals were being done, but [ruled that her hands were tied](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/judge-says-u-trying-circumvent-235941246.html) once the deportees were in Ghanaian custody. The U.S. then sent 10 more flights to Ghana. In June, lawyers for 27 deportees [filed a complaint against Ghana](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/30/advocacy-groups-file-complaint-against-ghana-over-trump-deportations) at the ECOWAS Court of Justice, saying most of them were removed within hours or days of landing. Ghana’s foreign minister has said they went home voluntarily. (Ghana is one of several stops; rews has also covered [Colombians deported to Congo](https://rews.cc/a/deported-to-congo-three-colombians-ask-spain-for-the-safety--ef2628).) ## Who was on the plane Percival’s defense of the program is about public safety. He says earlier administrations “absolutely abdicated their responsibility” by letting criminals back onto the street, and that countries like Eswatini and South Sudan have taken people convicted of murder, sexual assault, kidnapping and armed robbery after their home countries refused them. He could not say what share of people deported were violent offenders. On Diawara’s flight, 19% of passengers had been charged with or convicted of crimes such as theft, assault, or drug or weapons possession. Another 19% had a traffic violation, and 62% had no record at all. Out of 63 people, that is roughly 39 with no record. Diawara got out of Mali after several weeks with the help of some truckers. He accepts that the U.S. had the right to deport him, just not to Mali. Sierra Leone is more open about all this than DHS is. Deportees who land there are often given a pamphlet that says: “Sierra Leone is serving as a temporary transit location while arrangements are made to return you to your country of origin.”