The 15 Latin Americans deported by the United States to the Democratic Republic of the Congo under Donald Trump's third-country deportation programme are running out of time — and out of options. Held in a hotel in the capital, Kinshasa, with supervised outings about once a week, they now face what their lawyer calls an impossible choice: go back to the home countries a US judge said were unsafe for them, or stay in Congo with no support at all.
"They treat us like we're children," a 29-year-old Colombian woman told the Associated Press from the Kinshasa hotel, as the group's three-month Congolese visas neared their end with no plan in sight. She had never heard of Congo before she arrived.
The woman is one of 15 people — seven women and eight men, from Colombia, Peru and Ecuador — transferred to the DRC under an undisclosed agreement between Washington and Kinshasa. All of them had been granted withholding or deferral of removal by US immigration judges who found they would likely face persecution or torture if sent home, according to the Third Country Deportation Watch project and court records reviewed by Reuters.
A judge said she would likely be tortured if sent home
The 29-year-old Colombian woman told Reuters she left Colombia after being kidnapped and tortured by an armed group, and suffering abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, who was a police officer. In her asylum application, filed in January 2024, she described that ordeal in detail. In May 2025, a US immigration judge ruled she was more likely than not to be tortured if sent back to Colombia.
She was nevertheless put on a flight to Congo. Another deportee, a 30-year-old Colombian woman named Gabriela, told AFP she only learned she was being sent to the DRC a day before the flight, during a 27-hour journey in which the deportees' hands and feet were shackled. "I didn't want to go to Congo," she said. "I'm scared; I don't know the language."
Their US-based lawyer, Alma David, who represents one of the asylum seekers in the DRC, told the AP the deportees have been offered two paths by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN-affiliated body now central to their case: return to Colombia, where a US judge has ruled she cannot safely be sent back, with IOM "protection and assistance" — or remain in Congo with no support.
"The goal is clear: put people in a place so unfamiliar that they give up and agree to return home, despite the immense risk they face there," David told Reuters. "They are given impossible choices," she told the AP. "By deporting them to a third country with no opportunity to contest being sent there, the US not only violated their due process rights but our own immigration laws and our obligations under international treaties."
A new court ruling says the US likely broke the law
It was not immediately clear what a new US court ruling will mean for the group. The ruling found the US likely broke the law by deporting a fellow Colombian to Congo, the AP reported — a decision that could strengthen legal challenges to the whole third-country programme.
The Trump administration has struck third-country deportation deals with at least seven other African nations, and has spent at least $40 million deporting about 300 migrants to countries other than their own, according to a report by the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi has described the arrangement as an "act of goodwill between partners" with no financial compensation, telling reporters: "We agreed to do so as a friendly gesture, simply because it was what the Americans wanted." He added that the migrants are free to leave Congo at any time. Kinshasa has stressed the stay is temporary, with each case subject to individual review under Congolese law, and Washington funding "their reception, support and care."
For the 15 in the Kinshasa hotel, that assurance has not translated into a future. Their visas are expiring, their outings are supervised, and the only two doors open to them both lead somewhere they say they cannot safely go — or nowhere at all.
Sources: Associated Press, Reuters, Al Jazeera, AFP, Third Country Deportation Watch.