the us agreed 40 lgbt migrants would be persecuted at home. then it deported them to countries that criminalize or abuse gay people. read that twice.
Abdou Latifou was seen kissing the man he loved in Togo, and a mob assaulted him and threatened to kill him. He fled to the United States, according to his asylum application, and last November a US immigration judge agreed it was not safe to send him home. "I told myself, 'From this day on, I'm entering a world where I'm free to live as myself,'" he told Reuters.
In June, the US put him on a deportation plane to Sierra Leone, where, under a colonial-era law, gay men can be sentenced to life in prison. He was later sent back to Togo anyway.
what reuters found
Latifou is one of 40 people Reuters documented in an investigation published Monday: migrants who won US legal protection after being persecuted for being LGBT, then were deported to third countries in Africa that either criminalize same-sex relations or have been flagged by the State Department as hostile to LGBT people. Reuters says it interviewed a dozen deportees and immigration lawyers and reviewed hundreds of pages of legal documents.
The destinations: Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Eswatini, which all criminalize same-sex sexual acts, and the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the State Department has previously documented abuses including "corrective rape" and conversion therapy. The Human Dignity Trust lists Cameroon's penalty as six months to five years in prison, for women as well as men.
Of the 40, Reuters reports that 16 are still in the country they were deported to, some of them detained. Sixteen more were sent back to their home countries against their will, which is to say, to the exact place a US judge had ruled they could not safely go. Nine are in hiding somewhere else. One Ghanaian man has stopped answering his lawyers and his family. Another gay Ghanaian man, deported to Sierra Leone and then repatriated, has spent four months hiding in the forests of neighboring Togo.
how this is legal
More than half of the 40, Latifou included, were not eligible for asylum because of a Biden-era rule that disqualified people who had not applied in the countries they passed through on the way. A federal court vacated that rule in May, too late for them. Latifou instead got a lesser protection that barred sending him to Togo and allowed sending him anywhere else, and the administration has spent the year using that gap. More than 40,000 people have been deported to countries not their own since Trump returned to office, according to preliminary government data Reuters obtained, about 900 of them to Africa.
A federal judge, Brian Murphy, called the government's position an "absurdity" in February. Last Tuesday the Supreme Court put his ruling on hold. Arguments are in December.
The Department of Homeland Security told Reuters that ICE "does not enforce the law on the basis of sexual orientation, that would be illegal," and that "third country removals are an essential public safety tool." And, on what happens to people after the plane lands: "When an individual is no longer in ICE custody then ICE will no longer be responsible for them." That is the whole policy, said out loud.
not a one-off
CNN reported the same pattern independently last month, including a gay woman from Turkey sent to the Central African Republic after 18 months in detention, and a bisexual Ghanaian woman held in a government facility in Cameroon. "It's like you're a criminal," she told CNN. Bridget Crawford of Immigration Equality, quoted by both outlets, put it plainly to CNN: sending queer and trans people to countries that persecute them "is just unconscionable."
A former senior US immigration official, Claire Trickler-McNulty, told Reuters it "makes a mockery of our protection systems." We would go further, but she has the job title.
