Within days of landing in Ghana this summer, 17 of the 19 people whom CBS’s “60 Minutes” reached from a single U.S. deportation flight said Ghanaian officials had sent them, against their will, to the countries American immigration judges had ruled they could not safely be returned to, according to an investigation the program broadcast on Sunday.
The flight left Texas on July 30 with 63 people aboard, the program reported, and the countries its passengers were sent on to included Niger, Mali, Nigeria, Gambia and Guinea. Each of the 17 had been granted withholding of removal, a judge’s finding that the person would more likely than not face persecution or torture there. Asked whether Ghana had sent people home against their will, James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s top lawyer, said, “I’m not aware of any such cases.”
The broadcast is the latest of several independent counts to find the same thing. Reuters reported in January that Ghana had sent at least 22 of the more than 30 people the United States deported there in 2025 back to their home countries, despite U.S. court orders meant to prevent it. Human Rights Watch wrote this month that Ghana, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea “sent some people onward to risk of persecution or torture in their home countries.” And in a Washington courtroom in September 2025, the government’s own lawyer did not dispute that Ghana planned to do exactly that.
On legality, the record splits. The Supreme Court reads a withholding order as barring the United States from sending someone to one named country and nothing more, so a flight to Ghana obeys the letter of the ruling. A 1998 statute and the torture treaty behind it go further, covering any “involuntary return” the United States brings about, however indirect. No American court has yet held the government to that standard, and federal judges in Washington and Cincinnati have said they could not or would not step in. The Supreme Court hears the administration’s third-country policy on Dec. 9.
One flight, 63 names
Moussa Diawara came to the United States from Mali 25 years ago and overstayed a tourist visa. In 2012 an immigration judge ruled that he could be deported, but not to Mali, where he said he would be persecuted. The ruling let him get a work permit. He drove for Uber and owned a home in the Houston suburbs with his wife, Barbara Johnson, a registered nurse, and their two children, who are U.S. citizens. He had no criminal record.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were waiting at the house on July 11 when he came home from a night shift. He said he spent three weeks in detention in Texas without being able to speak to his lawyer or a judge. On July 31 he landed in Ghana, where he had never been and knew no one, and he said armed guards held him and others in a hotel and barred phone calls.
Within five days, he said, Ghanaian officials put him on a flight to Mali. He had converted to Christianity, he told the program, and Mali is a Muslim-majority country with an Islamist insurgency. He said he was left there with no money or identification and slept on a bench. After three weeks, truckers helped him reach another African country, which he asked CBS not to name.
Mr. Diawara said Washington knew where he would end up. A document he said U.S. officials gave him on the plane, along with a supply of his medication, listed his destination as “S-H-R-C Mali,” for special high risk charter. Both of his DHS-issued bag tags read “Mali.” Shown them, Mr. Percival said, “Well, he wasn’t flown to Mali.”
After the interview, the department said in a statement that the tags were “produced by contractors” who “are not part of the process that determines...the destination,” and it called the medication form a “clerical error,” CBS reported. It said Ghana had given “diplomatic assurances for his safety” and questioned whether his fear of persecution was credible. Ghana’s government declined to comment.
The flight had been described before. In August, The American Prospect reported on a 26-hour trip that left Fort Worth on July 30 and stopped in Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic and Ghana, and estimated that about 71 people were aboard, more than the 63 names CBS later obtained. A Guinean passenger, Mohamed Barry, told the magazine that in Accra a Ghanaian official called out the Nigerians, all of whom had withholding of removal or similar protection, and that they were put on a plane to Nigeria. He said the departing ICE agent told the Ghanaians, “Take them all to their home countries.”
ICE did not answer the magazine’s questions, and Mr. Barry’s account of the agent’s words could not be independently verified. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said of the Nigerians’ treatment, “As described, that would be unlawful.”
What that interaction does is it pierces the veil of legal fictions that ICE is engaged in.
What a withholding order does
Withholding of removal is a narrower shield than asylum. It comes from a provision of immigration law and from the regulations that carry out the Convention Against Torture, and it bars removal to a specific country. In Johnson v. Guzman Chavez in 2021, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that a judge who grants it “prohibits DHS from removing the alien to that particular country, not from the United States.” The removal order stays in force.
For years that left power mostly unused. Justice Stephen Breyer, dissenting in the same case, cited figures showing that in the 2017 fiscal year “only 1.6% of noncitizens granted withholding-only relief were ever actually removed to an alternative country.” The majority answered that “the fact that alternative-country removal is rare does not make it statutorily unauthorized.”
It is no longer rare. Nearly one million people were deported in the first year and a half of President Trump’s second term, and about 25,000 went to third countries, CBS reported. Human Rights Watch, using ICE data, counted nearly 28,000 such removals to more than 50 countries between Jan. 20, 2025, and Aug. 5, 536 of them to Africa. Jamaica took its first 22 this month.
For torture, Congress wrote a wider rule. Section 2242 of the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 makes it U.S. policy “not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” The U.N. Committee Against Torture, which monitors the treaty, said in a 1997 general comment that the ban covers the receiving country “as well as to any State to which the author may subsequently be expelled, returned or extradited.” Lawyers call the practice chain refoulement.
The administration’s rules for these removals were set in a March 30, 2025, memo signed by Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary. If a receiving country gives assurances that deportees will not be persecuted or tortured and the State Department finds them credible, people may be removed without further procedures, and officers are not to ask whether they fear the destination. Human Rights Watch pointed out that the memo does not require an assurance against onward transfer.
How the Ghana deal began
The first U.S. flight under the Ghana arrangement left Louisiana on Sept. 5, 2025, with 14 West Africans, 13 Nigerians and a Gambian, The Associated Press reported. Ghana’s foreign minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, said the country would take only West Africans and was paid nothing. “We just could not continue to take the suffering of our fellow West Africans,” he said.
Lawyers for five of the men sued in federal court in Washington. At an emergency hearing that weekend, a Justice Department lawyer did not dispute that Ghana intended to send them home and acknowledged that Ghana appeared to be breaching the assurances it had given, CBS News reported. Judge Tanya Chutkan called the government’s position “disingenuous” and asked, “How’s this not a violation of your obligation?”
Her written opinion, on Sept. 15, 2025, denied relief anyway. The government’s actions, she wrote, “appear to be part of a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.” The court was “alarmed and dismayed,” she wrote, by “the government’s cavalier acceptance of Plaintiffs’ ultimate transfer to countries where they face torture and persecution. But its hands are tied.” The men were in Ghanaian custody, and the Supreme Court had let third-country removals continue that June.
Felix Kwakye Ofosu, a spokesman for Ghana’s president, later described the routine plainly: “As and when they come, they are processed and sent to their countries of origin.” In September 2025 the United States eased the visa restrictions it had placed on Ghanaians in July, and on Dec. 1, 2025, Mr. Ablakwa said a 15 percent U.S. tariff on cocoa and other farm goods had been lifted. Reuters could not establish whether those moves were tied to the deportations.
Rabbiatu Kuyateh, a 58-year-old nurse who had lived in Maryland for nearly 30 years after fleeing Sierra Leone’s civil war, was deported to Ghana on Nov. 5, 2025, with a grant of withholding of removal. She said she was held in a hotel for six days and then forced back to Sierra Leone. A video her family verified shows uniformed men dragging her across the hotel floor as she screams, “I’m not going!” An eyewitness told CBS the men were Ghanaian officials, and Ghana’s interior ministry opened an inquiry on Nov. 12, 2025, whose results have not been made public.
Reuters built its count of at least 22 from six lawyers, court filings in both countries and complaints to the U.N. human rights office in Geneva. The people it counted had been protected because of their political views, because they are gay or bisexual and come from countries that criminalize same-sex relations, as in other U.S. removals, or because they feared female genital mutilation. The lawyers said none of their clients got a chance to object before being sent home.
What Washington knew
In the Washington case, the government filed a State Department declaration dated Sept. 13, 2025, saying the United States had “received diplomatic assurances from the Government of Ghana, communicated to the U.S. government by diplomatic note.” The same declaration said the United States had not “made any additional efforts” against refoulement, according to Third Country Deportation Watch, a project that tracks the flights.
Those assurances, as a federal appeals court later described them, promised that deportees would not be persecuted or tortured in Ghana or in any country to which they might later be sent. Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote in [a February report](https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/(FINAL%20-%20web)%20At%20What%20Cost%20-%20Inside%20the%20Trump%20Administration%27s%20Secret%20Deportation%20Deals_2.17.26.pdf) that officials had acknowledged in court that Ghana appeared to be violating them, and that a State Department official later confirmed the government had taken no corrective action.
The flights kept going. Third Country Deportation Watch lists nine to Ghana through July 31, carrying an estimated 110 or more people. Meredyth Yoon, an immigration lawyer who has represented six deportees sent there, told CBS that 10 more flights went to Ghana after last year’s lawsuit, which she believes violates international law.
They sent him to Ghana, with full knowledge that Ghana is systematically deporting refugees back to the very countries they fled.
Ghana is not the only stop where the purpose is written down. People arriving in Sierra Leone get a pamphlet saying the country “is serving as a temporary transit location while arrangements are made to return you to your country of origin,” CBS reported. Mr. Percival’s answer was that deportees “are entitled to return to their home country if they consent.”
The government’s case
Pressed on the returns, Mr. Percival offered two 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 first does not fit the record. Seventeen of 19 deportees from one flight said they were moved against their will, Ms. Kuyateh was filmed being dragged, and lawyers told Reuters that two Togolese women were taken across the border on motorbikes, avoiding formal crossings. The second has no public support: Ghana has described no screening, its spokesman has said deportees are processed and sent home as they arrive, and lawyers for 27 deportees said most were flown out within hours or days even after telling Ghanaian officials about their U.S. protections.
The government’s legal position is stronger than its factual one. Guzman Chavez supports its view that a withholding order speaks only to the United States, and the department treats what happens after a handover as another country’s act. “Once an illegal alien is in another country’s custody, we refer you to them for questions,” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokeswoman, told Reuters. The courts that have ruled so far have either accepted that or said they lacked the power to question it.
Mr. Percival also said the removals had “stopped crimes from happening” and that Eswatini and South Sudan had accepted people convicted of murder, armed robbery, kidnapping and sexual assault. Asked what share of deportees were violent offenders, he said he did not have the figure. Of the 63 people on Mr. Diawara’s flight, CBS found a criminal charge or conviction for 19 percent, for offenses including theft, assault, drugs and weapons possession, and traffic violations or no record for the rest.
ICE answered the broadcast on X the next day, in a post the White House reshared, according to Meaww. It said Mr. Diawara was in the country illegally under a final removal order and accused him of having claimed to be gay to avoid deportation.
NOT a Texas father!
He is an ILLEGAL ALIEN from Mali with a final order of removal from a judge, who said he’s homosexual in order to dodge deportation - despite having a wife and two kids at home.
Wonder why @60Minutes didn’t ask him about that.
The removal order was never in dispute; CBS reported it. What barred Mali was the 2012 withholding grant, and neither the post nor the department’s statement said that grant had been set aside.
What the courts have said
The broadest challenge is a class action in Boston, D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security. On Feb. 25, Judge Brian Murphy of Federal District Court in Massachusetts struck down the Noem guidance, ruling that people must get meaningful notice and a chance to raise their fears before a third-country removal. He wrote that “nobody really knows anything about these purported ‘assurances,’” and asked, “How can anyone even know for certain that they exist?”
On Sept. 18 a panel of the First Circuit largely affirmed him. The Prospect reported that the court cast doubt on the countries’ blanket assurances and noted the policy’s lack of safeguards against onward removal. On Sept. 29 the Supreme Court paused the ruling in an unsigned order, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson saying they would have denied the request, SCOTUSblog reported. Solicitor General D. John Sauer had told the justices the ruling took away “an essential tool to remove certain aliens, including some of the worst criminal aliens.”
The Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, went the other way in an individual case. In a published order filed Oct. 9, it refused to halt the removal to Ghana of Ifeoma Ada Chinweoke Ojukwu, a Nigerian woman with withholding of removal under a 2013 order, finding that her claims largely duplicated the class action and that her evidence of harm was evenly balanced against Ghana’s assurances, which it called credible. The order drew notice when a California immigration lawyer summarized it on Oct. 24.
Help after the fact has been slow. On Oct. 9 a federal judge in California said the government had “slow-walked” the return of a Nigerian man it deported to Ghana, who hid in Togo after refusing to board a bus to Nigeria, Law360 reported.
Under international law the answer is plainer. Elora Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia Law School, told Reuters that if Ghana and Equatorial Guinea deny a real chance to contest repatriation, “they are not safe third countries.”
Third countries cannot be used to circumvent the prohibition on refoulement.
Human Rights Watch reached the same conclusion about U.S. responsibility, writing in its Oct. 8 release that the government violates its obligations when it sends people where “they would likely be subjected to onward deportations to face such threats.”
What comes next
In Ghana, the Supreme Court ordered the attorney general in February to let lawyers for Democracy Hub, a pressure group, inspect the agreement in a constitutional challenge filed in October 2025. It has not ruled on the merits. On June 29, Democracy Hub and lawyers from Merton & Everett, Cornell Law School’s Transnational Disputes Clinic and the Global Strategic Litigation Council sued Ghana at the ECOWAS Court of Justice in Abuja, Nigeria, for 27 deportees, seeking at least $100,000 each and publication of the deal. That court has not set a hearing.
The Supreme Court will hear the D.V.D. case on Dec. 9. The justices asked for briefing on whether the guidance is lawful under the removal statute, the Due Process Clause and the torture-convention law that carries the 1998 rule against involuntary return, and on whether the lower court had the power to hear the case at all. A decision is expected next year.
Mr. Diawara’s lawyer, Reuben S. Kerben, has asked a federal judge in Washington to order him returned to the United States. His son, Corey, is 16, and his daughter, Chloe, is 12. “They can send me to third country,” Mr. Diawara said. “But not back to my country of origin. And that’s what they do.”