By Robbie Corey-Boulet, Kristina Cooke, Ngouda Dione and Loucoumane Coulibaly
DAKAR, Oct 5 (Reuters) – Two years ago, a mob assaulted Abdou Latifou and threatened to kill him after he was seen kissing the man he loved.
He fled his home in the West African nation of Togo and sought refuge in the United States, according to his asylum application.
Latifou rejoiced last November when a US immigration judge ruled it was not safe for him to be sent home.
“I told myself, ‘From this day on, I’m entering a world where I’m free to live as myself,’” he said.
In June, though, Latifou was forced onto a US deportation plane — not back to Togo but to Sierra Leone, a nation where gay men can be sentenced to life in prison under colonial-era laws.
President Donald Trump’s administration has deported tens of thousands of people to third countries, enabled by deals with impoverished foreign governments.
Latifou’s case is one of 40 documented by Reuters where migrants granted US legal protection after being persecuted for their LGBT status were deported to third countries in Africa that either criminalize same-sex relations or have been described by the State Department as hostile to LGBT people.
Reuters has tracked the fate of all 40 – including people from across Africa, as well as Iraq, Jamaica and Russia – by interviewing a dozen deportees and immigration lawyers and reviewing hundreds of pages of legal documents.
Sixteen remain in the countries they were deported to and some are still detained. Sixteen others, like Latifou, were repatriated to their home countries against their will. Nine are in hiding in third locations. One Ghanaian man is no longer in contact with his lawyers or relatives, they said.
Sending people “to a third country where they face the very persecution we recognized makes a mockery of our protection systems,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior US immigration official.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement “does not enforce the law on the basis of sexual orientation, that would be illegal,” Chandler Rebel, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, said in a statement. “Third country removals are an essential public safety tool.”
A NEW TACTIC
Third-country deportations were rare before Trump’s second term.
But since he returned to office and began a wide-ranging immigration crackdown, more than 40,000 people in total have been deported to countries not their own by ICE and Border Patrol, according to preliminary government data shared with Reuters, far higher than previous estimates from advocates. About 900 were sent to African countries.
In a February order, in a case challenging the policy, US District Judge Brian Murphy highlighted the risks facing gay people. The government’s claim that those targeted had not explicitly asked not to be deported to repressive third countries was an “absurdity,” he wrote.
“No person could reasonably be expected to make detailed, prophylactic claims about every country on Earth to which she might have a valid claim against removal.”
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court put a hold on Murphy’s ruling, allowing the administration to continue third-country deportations. The court will hear arguments in December.
HOSTILE GROUND
The 40 cases documented by Reuters involve deportations to three countries that explicitly criminalize same-sex sexual acts: Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Eswatini.
In three other countries that do not have such laws on the books — Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the State Department has previously documented abuses against LGBT people, including “corrective rape” and conversion therapy.
Government spokespeople for the six countries did not respond to requests for comment.
Bridget Crawford, director of law and policy at Immigration Equality, an LGBT advocacy group, said the US has repeatedly granted asylum to LGBT people from these countries. Her group has helped 12 Cameroonians and one person from Congo win asylum in recent years.
But more than half of the 40, including Latifou, were not eligible for asylum because they did not apply for it in countries they passed through before illegally entering the US. This was disqualifying under Biden-era restrictions that a federal court vacated in May.
The judge in Latifou’s case granted a lesser protection, barring the government from deporting him to Togo but allowing his removal elsewhere.
After being flown to Sierra Leone, Latifou said he was held for two weeks in a hotel under police surveillance.
Guards then put him on a flight back to Togo. He arrived with a few items of clothing and $100 to his name.
He traveled to his village to see his mother, but a relative soon warned him that he was not safe and helped him cross the border to Benin. He continued on to Ivory Coast, where he lives with a friend and works as a security guard.
Same-sex relations are not illegal in his new home, but Ivorian activists have reported rising homophobic violence, and Latifou avoids the Togolese community, “so I don’t get recognized.”
“When an individual is no longer in ICE custody then ICE will no longer be responsible for them,” Rebel, the DHS spokesman, said.
‘UPSIDE DOWN’
Many of the deportees who spoke to Reuters said they wound up wherever someone would take them in.
A bisexual Ghanaian woman was deported to Cameroon in January and remained there for seven months.
Unable to speak French, the primary local language, and fearing for her safety if she returned to Ghana, she went to live with a relative in northern Nigeria, where penalties for same-sex sexual acts can include lashes or death by stoning.
Most days she does not leave the house, she said.
A gay man from Ghana — deported to Sierra Leone, then forcibly repatriated — has spent four months hiding out in the forests of neighboring Togo. He survives on small sums of money sent by his mother, he said.
Most nights he sleeps on a blanket on the ground, seeking cover in an abandoned, half-finished house when it rains.
A 44-year-old Mauritanian man who lived in the US for more than a decade was detained by ICE in January and flown to Eswatini, a small southern African kingdom he had never heard of.
He spent a month and a half in a mosquito-infested prison with no hot water, he said in an interview.
He finally agreed to be flown back to Mauritania, then slipped over the border into Senegal, where the government recently doubled the maximum penalty for same-sex sexual acts.
Now staying with relatives in a remote town, he is trying to find out if any countries in Europe or Asia might accept him.
“My life just got turned upside down,” he said.
(Reporting by Robbie Corey-Boulet in Dakar and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and Alistair Bell)
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