PNN – The first American plane carrying deported migrants, including citizens of Iran, Afghanistan, and Türkiye, landed in the Central African Republic as part of Donald Trump’s immigration plan.
According to the report of Pakistan News Network, quoted by France24, The first plane carrying Iranian, Afghan, Turkish and Georgian migrants deported from the United States landed in Bangui, Central African Republic, on Friday evening as part of a controversial U.S. program to send undocumented foreigners to third countries, the latest to join a list of African countries that have agreed to accept people deported from the United States.
Deporting people — including those with legal protections — to countries they have no ties to has become a central plank of the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown. The U.S. State Department’s advisory for the impoverished and violence-plagued Central African Republic says: Do not travel to the Central African Republic for any reason.
Their lawyer said Trump has described Iran as a “terrorist regime” but is still deporting citizens who have fled the country, including at least two Iranian women scheduled to be on the flight. The Iranians had been granted “withholding of removal” — a status that carries weaker rights than asylum but was considered a “win” in immigration court under previous administrations.
In recent years, a UN peacekeeping mission, Rwandan troops and Russian mercenaries have helped improve the security situation in the Central African Republic. But anti-government fighters and armed groups are still present throughout the volatile, mineral-rich country. Washington has argued that it only refuses to send people with “deportation orders” to their countries of origin and can therefore send them anywhere else, even if those countries send them home.
It is unclear what will happen to the deportees once they enter the Central African Republic. This appears to be the first of a series of vague deportation agreements between Bangui and Washington in Africa and elsewhere. “We don’t know whether these migrants who come to Central African territory and are accepted there are in transit or whether they have the right to apply for asylum,” Paul Crescent Beninga, a political scientist and civil society leader, told AFP.
Last week, a petition was filed with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights — the continent’s highest human rights body — to halt U.S. deportations to Equatorial Guinea, a small, authoritarian oil-producing country that has served as a staging post for African deportees. The petition also seeks to prevent Equatorial Guinea from returning deportees to their countries of origin.