There is a moment, when a Spanish police patrol car rolls through one of Valencia’s largest parks, when Lorena López stops hearing her boxing instructor. The 29-year-old Colombian spent a year and a half held at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona before ICE officers put her on a plane, handcuffed at the hands and feet, and deported her to the Democratic Republic of the Congo on April 15, 2026. The sight of uniformed officers also brings back the armed men she and 14 other Latin Americans encountered at the hotel where they were held in Kinshasa for two months. Then she remembers where she is. She left the DRC in June, she is in Spain, and if police ask for her documents she can show a photo on her phone: the receipt proving she applied for international protection in July.
“Our lawyer has explained to us that they are denying asylum to Colombians,” she told this newspaper, which agreed not to use her real name, “but we know a small percentage are approved. We cling to that hope.”
The fine print
Here is the mechanism that put López in Kinshasa, and it is worth understanding because it is essentially a loophole wearing a legal costume. All three Colombians in this story had CAT protection in the United States, meaning protection under the UN Convention Against Torture. That protection is not a visa and it is not asylum. It does one narrow thing: it stops the U.S. from sending you back to the country where you face torture. It says nothing at all about third countries. So Washington, which had accepted that sending these people to Colombia was off the table, simply found somewhere else to send them. The letter of the commitment was honored and the spirit was put on a plane, via Senegal and Ghana.
The scale of this is not small. According to data from Human Rights First and Refugees International, two NGOs that monitor the transfers, the U.S. deported more than 25,000 people to third countries between January 20, 2025 and September 2026, under agreements Washington has signed with more than 35 countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas. More than 300 detainees have been taken to 14 African countries, including the DRC, Eswatini, Liberia, the Central African Republic and South Sudan — a practice that survived a court fight when the Supreme Court let the third-country flights resume.
López, who says she was a victim of gender-based violence, sat for the interview beside Carlos Rodelo, 43, from Barranquilla, who gives his real name and agrees to be photographed because he wants Spain’s help. He says he fled extortion and death threats. “I want to make it clear that we are not here on a whim; it’s for our safety. We cannot return to Colombia,” he says. A third, Daniela, 31, from Cúcuta, says by voice note that she fled after being harassed and threatened by a police commander; she asked that her surname be withheld. The reasons they cannot go back are not abstractions: Colombia recorded 118 femicides and more than 15,000 cases of domestic violence against women in 2025, and reports of extortion have risen 144% over the past decade, to 13,417 cases last year.
A hotel that felt like a prison
The U.S. and the DRC had signed a bilateral agreement in December for the African country to receive deportees; the deal, made public in April, admitted people on short-term permits. The group of 15 — eight of them Colombians — landed in Kinshasa on April 17 after stopping in Senegal and Ghana, and was housed at the Venus Village hotel, about 30 minutes from the airport, where the International Organization for Migration provided assistance at the DRC government’s request. It remains the only group sent to the DRC so far.
“Although it was a hotel, it felt like a prison because we couldn’t go out,” Rodelo says. Buying food or visiting a phone center to collect money from family required requesting accompaniment. There were daily power cuts, the water frequently ran out, and everything was full of mosquitoes; one bit Rodelo and he got malaria. When the internet worked, he looked up where he was. “I had never heard of that place in my life,” he says. Google informed him that in the country’s east, the war between the state and the M23 rebel group had intensified since early 2025, leaving thousands dead and 6.1 million displaced, alongside illegal mining, mafias and poverty. “Imagine: it was going from bad to worse—danger in Colombia, danger in the U.S. and now danger in the Congo.”
Getting out took luck, money and timing, in roughly that order. López’s lawyer told her she had the right to leave for another country, so they chose Spain and declined the IOM’s offer of assisted voluntary return to Colombia. The Colombian consulate in Kenya helped issue new passports — her lawyer confirms ICE had confiscated López’s original. Then in mid-May the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern over an Ebola outbreak in eastern DRC, and the race was on to leave before travel restrictions bit, with tickets to Madrid funded by online fundraisers and family. Daniela left on June 1 for France; López and Rodelo flew to Spain on June 8.
Now comes act two, in which the odds are ugly. The Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid, CEAR, is supporting their applications, but Jaume Durà, head of CEAR’s legal team in Valencia, says the process will not be easy: of the 40,512 Colombian applications decided in Spain in 2025, just 3% obtained some form of protection. A year ago the EU put Colombia on its list of “safe” countries, even though parts of it remain threatened by armed actors, drug trafficking and criminal groups, and even though it is the country where the most environmental defenders are killed. “Spain grants a very low recognition rate to protection claims from people fleeing the country. That should not be the case; each case must be examined individually,” Durà says.
Lorena* had the chance to get a passport, the money to travel and to enter a large number of countries without a visa. Most people are forced to choose between returning to their country, where they may suffer violence, or finding a way to stay in a place that is not safe and where the government does not offer them permanent status. — Alma David, lawyer for Lorena López*
David calls her client’s escape “exceptional,” and the numbers back her up: apart from the DRC group, monitoring by the two NGOs has turned up deportees who managed to leave only from Uganda. The IOM, for its part, says in a press release that since 2025 it has assisted and advised 800 people in this situation, about 300 of whom later opted for voluntary return — and it is careful to add that the gap between those figures and the tens of thousands relocated “is not an indicator of IOM’s effort but reflects the small number of governments that invited us to intervene.” Most relocated people, the IOM says, have received no support at all.
“I don’t feel anger toward Congo. I just don’t feel it can give me the security I seek,” López says. “I’m angrier with the U.S.” Which is a reasonable accounting of the transaction: the United States kept its promise not to send her somewhere dangerous, by sending her somewhere dangerous.