From thousands of miles away, a Texas dad, hiding in a country he doesn’t know, reminded his son to vacuum the carpet each week.
Moussa Diawara is from Mali, but spent nearly half his life living in the United States, where he married, had two U.S. citizen children, worked and paid taxes. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported him to Ghana over the summer. Diawara has no connection to Ghana, but a judge had issued an order that he couldn’t be deported to Mali, because it was likely he’d be persecuted there. Diawara said that within days of his arrival in Ghana, local officials forced him onto a flight to Mali.
“I still say to myself, ‘This isn’t real,'” Diawara said.
Third-country deportations are a reality for many as President Trump’s administration seeks to carry out the largest deportation in U.S. history. When the U.S. government decides an immigrant can’t stay in the U.S., and can’t be sent to their home country, it can send them to a third country. A 60 Minutes investigation found that some of the third countries accepting deportees from the U.S. are routinely sending them back to the very countries they fled — locations where U.S. immigration judges ruled they would likely be persecuted or tortured.
What happened to Moussa Diawara
Diawara, 57, came to the U.S. on a tourist visa when he was 32. He overstayed that visa, and later applied for refugee protection, arguing he would be persecuted if he were to return to Mali. Diawara had converted to Christianity, and Mali’s a Muslim-majority nation with an Islamist insurgency. He has no criminal record.
In 2012, a U.S. immigration judge ruled that Diawara could not be deported to Mali, but the U.S. could find a safe alternative if it ever wanted to remove him from the country. As a result of the ruling, Diawara was able to get a U.S. work permit. He worked as an Uber driver and was finishing a night shift on July 11 of this year when he found ICE agents waiting for him at the suburban Houston home where he lived with his wife and children, who are U.S. citizens.
Diawara spent three weeks in ICE detention in Texas, unable to speak to his lawyer or a judge. He was loaded onto a plane and deported to Ghana, a country he never visited or had any ties to, on July 31. In Ghana, Diawara said he and others were detained in a hotel by armed guards and were not allowed to make phone calls.
“I cannot call my wife, I can’t contact my lawyer. I can’t talk to no one,” Diawara said. “I tell them, ‘This is kidnapping. You guys kidnapped us.'”
60 Minutes first got in touch with Diawara in August. At the time, he was homeless and hiding in Mali, fearing for his safety after Ghanaian officials dropped him there with no money or identification.
He was able to escape to another country with the help of some local truckers after several weeks in Mali. Diawara asked for the country to not be disclosed out of concern for his safety.
Diawara acknowledged that the U.S. had a right to deport him, but not to Mali. And he believes the U.S. knew Ghana would send him there. U.S. officials gave him a medical document on the flight to Ghana with the destination listed as “SHRC Mali” — SHRC stands for Special High Risk Charter, referring to the kind of flight Diawara was on.
“So they know 100% I’m going to Mali,” Diawara said.
Both of his bag tags, issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), also list the destination as Mali.
“Well, he wasn’t flown to Mali,” said James Percival, DHS’s top lawyer. “He was flown to Ghana, but I can’t speak to why that piece of paper says that.”
A DHS spokesperson later followed up with a statement, saying the bag tags were “produced by contractors” who “are not part of the process that determines…the destination.” The medication form, the statement said, was a “clerical error.” Ghana’s government declined to comment.
DHS says Ghana had provided the U.S. with “diplomatic assurances” for Diawara’s safety. The agency also questioned the credibility of Diawara’s arguments for fearing persecution in Mali.
Democrats and immigration attorney critique third-country deportations
Past administrations rarely deported people in Diawara’s situation. But as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation, ICE has deported 25,000 people to dozens of third countries that, in return, receive millions of dollars in aid or other benefits from the U.S. government.
A judge’s ruling that someone can be deported, but not to their home country, is called “withholding of removal.” Diawara had this protection, and so did dozens of others on his deportation flight, 60 Minutes found.
There were 63 people on Diawara’s third-country deportation flight, which left Texas on July 30, and stopped in Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic before landing in Ghana. Seventeen of the 19 people 60 Minutes reached who were deported to Ghana said they were subsequently sent, against their will, to countries U.S. immigration judges had ruled they should not be returned to, including Niger, Mali, Nigeria, Gambia and Guinea.
Immigration attorney Meredyth Yoon said she believes there’s no way U.S. officials don’t know what Ghana is doing to the people the U.S. deports there. She said the U.S. government was warned about Ghana’s conduct in a lawsuit last year. Despite this, the U.S. sent 10 more third-country deportation flights to Ghana. Yoon believes it’s a violation of international law.
A 30-page report from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats, commissioned by ranking member Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), slammed the administration’s third-country deportation program, critiquing it as costly and saying it undermined U.S. interests.
“Through its third country deportation deals, the Trump administration is putting millions of taxpayer dollars into the hands of foreign governments, while turning a blind eye to the human costs and potentially undermining our diplomatic relationships,” Shaheen said in a February press release.
Homeland Security lawyer says third-country deportations are widely misunderstood
Percival, DHS’s top lawyer, said he’s not aware of any cases of Ghana sending people on to other countries against their will. He argued that third-country deportations are widely misunderstood.
Asked whether he thinks people sent to third countries are then voluntarily going back to the places they fled, Percival said, “Either they would choose to go home, and they might not always be truthful about the fact that they consented, so that’s one possibility. The other possibility is that the foreign government applied their own procedures and, consistent with international law, determined that it was acceptable to return them home.”
Video footage released last year shows Ghanaian officials dragging Rabbiatu Kuyateh, a nurse who lived in the U.S. for 30 years, to a flight back to her native Sierra Leone. She, like Diawara, had a withholding of removal order from the U.S. stating she couldn’t be deported to her home country because she would likely be persecuted there.
Ghana isn’t the only country accused of sending deportees to countries that U.S. immigration judges ruled they should not be deported to. When deportees arrive in Sierra Leone, they often get a pamphlet that says, “Sierra Leone is serving as a temporary transit location while arrangements are made to return you to your country of origin.”
Percival said there is a public safety threat associated with “this population of aliens” and added that “every administration before President Trump absolutely abdicated their responsibility to the American people by letting criminals back on the street and doing no diplomatic efforts to get these people out of our country.”
He says third countries like Eswatini and South Sudan have agreed to accept deportees with criminal records for first-degree murder, sexual assault, kidnapping, and armed robbery when their home countries refused to take them back.
Percival said he did not know what percentage of people who had been detained and deported were violent offenders.
Of the 63 people on Diawara’s flight, 19% of the passengers had been charged with or convicted of crimes, including theft, assault, drugs or weapons possession. A 60 Minutes review found the other deportees either had a traffic violation (19%), or no criminal record at all (62%).
“This administration is following the law that Congress has passed. There are a lot of people in this population that we talk about who committed very serious crimes,” Percival said. “And people should be very happy with President Trump for getting these serious criminals out of the country.”
Last month, a federal appeals court upheld a ruling in a class action lawsuit that found the Trump administration’s third-country policy was unlawful because it denied deportees due process. But the Supreme Court has allowed these deportations to continue until it hears the case in December.
Diawara fighting to get back to his family in the U.S.
Moussa Diawara’s attorney, Reuben S. Kerben, has asked a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to order that he be returned to the U.S.
Meanwhile in Texas, Diawara’s wife Barbara, a registered nurse, is waiting for him, along with their two children. Their son Corey is 16, and their daughter Chloe is 12.
“It feels really empty without him,” Corey said.
He worries about his mom now.
“I’m trying, you know, not to cry in front of them, to be strong for them,” Barbara said, “because they need me.”
