Aylin is 28 and gay, and after a religious group and a close family member threatened her life in Turkey, she did the thing American law says you can do: she went to the United States and asked for protection. A US immigration judge agreed she deserved some of it, granting her withholding of removal — a formal finding that it would be unsafe to return her to Turkey because of her sexuality. Here is the thing about that finding, though: it named Turkey. So in July, after 18 months in US detention, she says she was handcuffed and shackled and put on a flight to the Central African Republic, a country she had never heard of until, she told CNN, she learned the destination mid-flight. CNN uses a pseudonym to protect her from reprisals.
The mechanism is doing a lot of work here. For years, the US offered protection to people who convinced immigration judges that being sent home could mean persecution, torture or death. The current administration’s position is that a removal order is a removal order, and if a judge has said you can’t be sent to your country, any other country willing to take you will do. Legal experts describe that as a loophole; the Trump administration has signed at least 35 third-country agreements across Africa, Latin America and elsewhere, according to the nonprofit initiative Third Country Deportation Watch, which counts thousands of people deported to third countries this year. Among them are LGBTQ asylum seekers who, like Aylin, had already won protections in US immigration courts. The government provides no data on how many deportees had sought protection based on characteristics like sexuality, but Bridget Crawford of Immigration Equality, an NGO providing legal services to LGBTQ migrants, believes the numbers have shot up.
“It’s terrible for any refugee to be put in that situation, being deported to a country where they have no connections, where they have no support system, where in so many cases, people are being arbitrarily detained where they don’t have a true opportunity for permanent status,” Crawford told CNN. “But if you’re queer or trans and you’re being sent to a country that persecutes queer and trans people, it is just unconscionable.”
Now consider the geography. Human rights groups note that nearly half of the countries accepting US deportees are African nations, many of which criminalize homosexuality; reports of a worsening climate for LGBTQ people are rising sharply across parts of the continent, and politicians have increasingly campaigned on anti-LGBTQ platforms. Over several weeks, CNN spoke with LGBTQ deportees scattered across Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and CAR, all of whom expressed disbelief and terror at where they had landed.
Adwoa — also a pseudonym, given her precarious position — is a 21-year-old bisexual Ghanaian who says her neighbors ostracized her family over her sexuality and accused them of witchcraft. She obtained a guarantee from a US court that she would not be deported back to Ghana, so she was sent to Cameroon, where same-sex relations are illegal and punishable by up to five years in prison. Crawford points out that her organization has represented LGBTQ Cameroonian nationals in asylum cases claiming persecution for their sexuality: one part of the US system grants protection to people fleeing Cameroon, while another deports people into it. Adwoa has spent the last few months in a government-run detention facility there. “It’s like you’re a criminal,” she said. “It’s a terrifying feeling.” She believes she could be killed if she returned to Ghana.
In CAR, homosexuality is not illegal, but a 2023 US State Department report called maintaining a homosexual relationship there “extraordinarily dangerous.” On the streets of Bangui, CNN encountered open hostility: “We don’t like them. They should be killed,” one person said, while another called for security forces to arrest and punish LGBTQ people. Human rights groups note that women in same-sex relationships across Africa can also face so-called “corrective” sexual violence, assaults, harassment and discrimination.
Asked about all this, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that “these third-country agreements, which ensure due process under the U.S. Constitution, are essential to the safety of our homeland and the American people,” adding: “We are applying the law as written. If a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.” Crawford’s assessment differs: “It’s an abdication of both our legal and our moral obligations. Under domestic law, and under international law.” A federal appeals court this month upheld a February ruling that aspects of the third-country deportation policy were unlawful — the question being whether migrants get an adequate opportunity to challenge transfers to unfamiliar countries — and the case is likely headed to the Supreme Court, which has previously allowed the deportations to continue by lifting temporary injunctions.
Aylin spent several weeks cooped up in a Bangui apartment block weighing her options: rejected by the US, unable to live freely in CAR, afraid of what waited in Turkey. “I’m so scared. I want to go outside, because I’m human. But I cannot go outside here,” she said. In the end she chose Turkey. “I hope everything has changed for people like me in Turkey,” she said the day before her flight. “But I’m so scared. Really, I’m so scared.” Some context: her asylum claim had been denied under a Biden-era border policy that restricted eligibility for migrants who crossed outside official pathways, a policy since struck down by a federal judge. And the Turkey she returned to has just carried out one of its most sweeping crackdowns on LGBTQ rights groups in years — coordinated raids on advocacy organizations and activists across multiple cities in September, with mass arrests and detentions. Homosexuality is legal in Turkey; officials defended the operation as protecting traditional family values.
Back home, Aylin has told her family she has changed her sexual orientation. “I will find a job, I will get money, I will leave secretly for Europe or somewhere else,” she said. “I cannot feel like myself here.” What she had asked for, originally, was this: “To live my life how I want to live, to take a breath. To have friends. A relationship.” The US agreed she couldn’t safely have it in Turkey, then flew her somewhere worse, and she flew herself back.