On June 12, a US deportation flight touched down in Bangui after a refuelling stop in Ghana. On board were 18 men and women — nationals of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Cameroon, Egypt, and Tunisia. None of them were Central African. All of them had, at some point, secured US court protections against deportation to their countries of origin, based on documented fears of persecution or torture. The Central African Republic — a country of 5.5 million people, currently hosting 1.1 million of its own internally displaced citizens, with a 2026 Humanitarian Response Plan funded at just 22% of stated need — had just become the newest destination in the Trump administration's expanding "third-country" deportation programme.
The mechanics of the deal, as reported by Reuters, were negotiated during a US delegation visit to Bangui the previous month. No public agreement has been disclosed. Neither the Central African presidency nor the US State Department responded to requests for comment from multiple news organisations. What is known: the US this year awarded $85 million to the International Organization for Migration specifically for operations in CAR — funding that predates, and appears to anticipate, exactly this kind of arrangement.
A legal workaround with a geography problem
Third-country deportation is not a new US policy, but its scale and destinations have shifted markedly in 2025 and 2026. Rather than returning individuals to their countries of nationality — where a US immigration judge may have already ruled that return would endanger their life — Washington has increasingly sought third countries willing to accept them instead. CAR now joins the DRC, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Equatorial Guinea on the list of African nations that have entered similar arrangements. Lawyers and rights advocates describe the mechanism plainly: it is a legal route around protections that US courts have already granted.
The legal terrain under this policy has been genuinely unsettled. A federal court in Massachusetts preliminarily blocked third-country removals in April 2025, in D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security; the Supreme Court stayed that injunction while litigation continued. The same court then invalidated DHS's third-country removal policy outright in February 2026, ruling that removing people to a third country without meaningful notice or the opportunity to contest it is unlawful. The CAR flight proceeded regardless — a sign that the policy's practical implementation has continued to outpace the litigation meant to constrain it.
Why CAR, and why now
The choice of CAR as a deportation destination is, on its face, difficult to reconcile with the country's own circumstances. Since the start of 2026, at least 60 people have been killed in clashes involving state forces, Russian paramilitary personnel, and non-state armed groups — a pattern documented independently of the Am-Dafock border attack in Vakaga Prefecture in late June. A February 2026 Lansing Institute assessment concluded that Russia's involvement in CAR now constitutes "de facto management of specific territories and resource flows," with Wagner-linked forces separately accused of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture. The World Health Organization has flagged the risk of an active Ebola outbreak spreading regionally as of May 2026. This is the operating environment into which 18 people with no ties to the country, no shared language in most cases, and documented fears of persecution elsewhere were delivered. For Bangui, the calculus appears to run through the same diversified-partnership logic that defines Central African foreign policy more broadly in 2026. President Touadéra has maintained close security ties with Russia while simultaneously signalling growing interest in Western partnership, particularly around critical minerals. Accepting US deportation flights — controversial as they are — is a low-cost way to generate goodwill in Washington, alongside the $85 million IOM funding stream, at a moment when CAR is actively courting Western capital to diversify away from near-total dependence on Africa Corps for security.
The rights dimension nobody has resolved
Human Rights Watch's response, issued shortly after the June flight, did not mince words: Central African authorities "should not have colluded with US mistreatment of refugees and asylum seekers in the first place," and having done so, now bear responsibility for the deportees' due process rights, freedom of movement, and living conditions. The organisation called on CAR to "refuse to continue to be a dumping ground for people the United States refuses to accept."
That framing captures the structural asymmetry at the heart of the arrangement. The deportees have no legal or social ties to CAR. Many do not speak French or Sango. They arrive in a country where the state's own displaced population — more than a million people — is competing for the same thin humanitarian resources that a chronically underfunded response plan cannot fully cover. The addition of foreign nationals with no local support network is not a footnote to that crisis. It is a direct addition to it, arranged through an agreement whose terms the public still cannot see.
For Washington, CAR represents one more data point in a rapidly expanding network of third-country arrangements that critics say functions specifically because it operates in the gaps between US judicial oversight and foreign governments' limited capacity or incentive to scrutinise the deal. For Bangui, it represents a low-cost transaction with a powerful partner, conducted at a moment when the government has strong incentives to say yes to whatever Washington is offering. Neither calculation accounts for what happens to the 18 people who landed in Bangui in June, or the ones likely to follow.
