Amnesty warns Sierra Leone deportees face forced return home

Amnesty International is urging Sierra Leone to halt the expected repatriation of three people deported from the United States, warning that the Sierra Leone deportees could face torture and other serious abuses if they are sent on to the countries they fled.

The three are Abalo Agba of Togo, Alfred Kamara of Liberia and Fatou Traore of Ivory Coast, according to Reuters. Each had lived in the United States for more than 20 years, and each has children under 18 still living there.

All three had secured a form of US protection known as withholding of removal. That means an immigration judge had found each of them more likely than not to face torture or other serious harm if returned home. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed them to Sierra Leone on October 12 anyway.

Amnesty said people deported to Sierra Leone under the arrangement have already been repatriated quickly to their home countries, and the group criticized what it called a revolving door policy of forcing people onward. A spokesperson for the Sierra Leone government and the US State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment, Reuters reported.

Withholding of removal is a limited but powerful protection. It is granted only when an applicant proves it is more likely than not that they would face persecution or torture in their home country. Unlike asylum, it does not lead to permanent residency, but it bars the government from sending the person back to the dangerous country. Amnesty's objection is that the Sierra Leone transfer achieves by a roundabout route what the protection was supposed to prevent.

The deportations have also split families across an ocean. All three have children under 18 in the United States, which means parents were separated from minor children with no clear path to reunite. Immigration advocates have long warned that third-country transfers make family contact and legal follow-up harder, because the deportee lands in a country where they have no lawyer, no community and no clear right to remain.

The agreement behind the deportations

The deal that brought the three to Sierra Leone is part of a broader US push. Sierra Leone reached an agreement with Washington to accept up to 300 West African third-country nationals a year. Since taking office in January last year, the Trump administration has struck several deals with African governments willing to receive migrants from other countries.

The arrangements vary in legal form, but they share a common feature: people are sent to countries where they are neither citizens nor habitual residents. Rights advocates say the practice strips away the protection that immigration courts granted to people fleeing persecution.

A wider pattern rights groups are documenting

The Sierra Leone case is one of many examined by Human Rights Watch in an October report titled To Scare People. The group said US authorities transferred 536 people to African countries where they had no citizenship or settled residence between January 2025 and August this year, and sent nearly 28,000 people to more than fifty countries worldwide.

The report says the policy allows Washington to send migrants to countries other than their own, including people with legal protection against removal to their home countries because of the risk of persecution or torture. Sierra Leone was among sixteen African countries involved in reported negotiations or agreements, according to the group.

For the Sierra Leone deportees, Amnesty says the danger is specific and immediate: sending them back to the countries they fled would return them to the harm an immigration judge already recognized. The group is asking Freetown to stop the repatriations and let each person seek protection where they are instead of passing them through a revolving door.

The families left behind face a different uncertainty. With parents now in Freetown under unclear legal status, relatives in the United States have little way to know whether the next step is a hearing, a release, or a one-way ticket to the country each of them fled decades ago.

The case adds to scrutiny of third-country deportation deals across Africa. Critics say the agreements benefit governments on both sides while leaving the deportees with no stable destination, and no one clearly responsible for what happens to them next.