Immigrants from Honduras, Cuba and Ecuador reported that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) “forcibly” deported them to the Central African Republic without prior notice, so they are seeking help to return, arguing that “they violated all their rights.”
Honduran Brayan Sánchez, who managed to sneak a cell phone into the detention center, stated in an interview with EFE via video call from Bangui, the capital of the African country, that the US authorities sent him and his four Cuban companions and an Ecuadorian to an unknown location.
«ICE only told me: everything you have is now closed, but by force, it was not voluntary at all. Africa was never mentioned to me. If they had mentioned it to me, I would go to El Salvador, I would go to Mexico in the end, but less Africa. Never by my will. Never,” he said from the place where he is detained.
Sánchez, who worked as a truck driver and has a pressure washing and painting corporation, said that he was detained on May 13 in Florida, from where he was transferred to places in Colorado, Arizona, California and Texas, where he met his Latino colleagues and discovered on July 30 that they would be sent to Africa.
At the last detention site, he said, two ICE officers arrived and “threatened” them and told them: “Tomorrow you are going to leave on the flight and if you don’t get on the plane, we are going to beat you up.”
«But why do they send us there?, I tell them. And they tell me: ‘we don’t know, they’re just going there.’ There we had no escape. It was something complicated, they violated our rights, the plane took 21 hours of flight, we made the first stop in Senegal and then they took us to Nigeria and then to the Central Republic of Africa,” he said.
With his mobile phone he has documented the area where he is detained in Bangui, where he assures that they are in a hotel, that the local authorities have asked them not to leave and that they will grant them a visa to stay there.
The Honduran recorded a video with the Ecuadorian Mauricio Alvarado and the Cubans Arístides Fernández, Omar Rodríguez and Almario Moreno, while the other has not identified himself publicly, to ask Florida congressmen and activists to help them return to the United States.
“We are please asking the congressmen from South Florida, María Elvira (Salazar) and all the people who can see this video, to make it viral, to listen to our voice, that this has been an injustice and we are having a very bad time,” Fernández expresses in the message.
Deportations to Africa
The fact reflects the Donald Trump Administration’s increasing deportations of immigrants from third countries to Africa, with agreements to accept them in Rwanda, South Sudan, Eswatini, Uganda, Ghana, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to the Institute of International and Strategic Relations.
The Administration increased these efforts after a Supreme Court ruling that authorized these expulsions in June 2025 and, since then, has “deported people to unsafe conditions without due process and with less than 24 hours’ notice,” asserts the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP).
Sánchez, who arrived in the United States in 2016, maintains that he had a court order preventing his deportation.
“I spoke with lawyers, they tell me: ‘no, they have to return you because they have violated all your rights, but the judge still doesn’t know what is happening to you, they have taken you by force, they have brought you by force.’ “These people want to do an experiment with us and continue sending immigrants here,” he said.
Although the Government of Honduras has publicly expressed that it is following up on the case and would support his “voluntary return,” Sánchez commented that he cannot return because the reason he left is because his father and uncles were killed and he was also threatened.
