Appeals court ruled third-country removals violated due process
Arístides Fernandez-Garcia had made his 85-year-old great-uncle a small promise. While visiting New Jersey late last year, the Cuban immigrant noticed that José Díaz liked the black baseball cap with a white Dodge Ram logo he was wearing. Fernandez-Garcia promised himself he would bring it to Díaz after returning from a Miami hearing in his pending asylum case.
He was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a targeted operation at the courthouse on Jan. 6. Through months in a maze of detention centers across the U.S., where he said he lost 60 pounds and witnessed shocking violence, Fernandez-Garcia said he held hard to the promise. He would call his great-uncle from detention. “I would tell him: ‘Stay strong, because I have to give you the hat,’” Fernandez-Garcia recalled. The old man would laugh.
Eight months later, Fernandez-Garcia sits in the living room of an apartment in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. He feels torn: guilty for giving Díaz hope, but resolved to keep his word. “That is something I have to do in life before anything else happens to him,” he said. “I have to give him that hat.”
Fernandez-Garcia is among the more than 25,000 people the Trump administration says it has deported to countries to which they have no ties. On Sept. 18, a federal appeals court ruled the “third country deportation” policy violates due process, finding that migrants were not given enough notice or a meaningful chance to say they feared being sent to a particular country. The Trump administration appealed on Sept. 24. On Sept. 29, the Supreme Court put the lower court’s ruling on hold, clearing the way for deportations to continue while the legal challenge plays out.
In a statement to NPR, the Department of Homeland Security said “Third country removals are an essential public safety tool that remove the most dangerous criminal illegal aliens from our streets.” DHS added that ICE obtains “diplomatic assurances” from destination countries that deportees will be safe after they arrive, and that people being removed receive “notice and assurances prior to their removal.”
NPR found no record of criminal charges in Florida against either Fernandez-Garcia or his roommate, Moreno-De Armas, who is also a Cuban immigrant deported by the U.S. Fernandez-Garcia did not have a deportation order either. Both men said they do not feel safe returning to Cuba. “I face punishment from the Cuban regime for having been a balsero — someone who fled Cuba by raft — and for trying to avail myself of the ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy and enter the United States under that protection,” Moreno-De Armas said.
Both men said they did not know where they were going when they boarded the plane in Texas. Fernandez-Garcia showed NPR how he sat on the plane for 12 hours, his hands shackled together and chained to a belt around his waist. He said it was not until they landed and he looked out the window that he saw the flag — striped green, yellow and red, with a green star in the center. That was the flag of Senegal, he realized. They were in Africa.
“My mind just went blank,” Fernandez-Garcia said. “I went blank because I realized that my life was out of my hands, like I didn’t have control over my own life anymore. I still don’t.”
In Bangui, the men share a bedroom in an apartment that houses four deportees, with the International Organization for Migration, a group affiliated with the United Nations, providing protection. Armed guards accompany them whenever they leave the complex. The State Department warns Americans not to visit the Central African Republic, citing risks of kidnapping, landmines and terrorism. The deportees shop at a small market of low-slung buildings with concrete walls and corrugated-metal roofs twice a week, buying canned goods and water. When the power is on, they talk to their families on WhatsApp and try to get their story out through interviews and social media videos.
Two months after their arrival, both men remained in legal limbo. “We don’t have documents that would allow us to work. They haven’t given us a visa,” Moreno-De Armas said. “We were deported from the United States to a third country and we’re still detained.”
Both men have fallen ill. Fernandez-Garcia contracted malaria, which kept him bedridden for days. Moreno-De Armas has high blood pressure, shortness of breath and panic attacks when he learned his mother had been hospitalized. But, Fernandez-Garcia said, what affects them most is not the physical toll. “Time with family, time with those people who have less time left, no, no, that can never be recovered again,” he said. “Not even with millions of dollars can that be recovered or bought.”
Other third-country deportees have spent far longer in Africa. Roberto Mosquera has been imprisoned in Eswatini for over a year, held at the high-security Matsapha Correctional Complex. He has a criminal record and has served his time in the U.S., according to his lawyer, Alma David, but faces no criminal charges in Eswatini. He does not know if or when he will be released. Since his imprisonment, his oldest sister and his best friend have died in the United States. He is also expected to miss his daughter’s wedding. “My youngest one’s going to be the flower girl,” Mosquera said, looking away from the screen. “It’s rough. I didn’t expect this to happen at my age.”
Moreno-De Armas’ father, Hiovany Moreno Noa, said learning that his son had been deported to Africa felt like “the world fell on top of me.” He tries to talk to his son every day and sends what money he can through Western Union. “If at least he were in a Spanish-speaking country, with more or less the same customs as us, then we could be a little more at ease,” he said from the backyard of his South Florida home. “But there, we don’t know anything. The little we do know is that it’s a country that has been at war. It’s a very dangerous country.”
The separation has echoes for the family. After Moreno-De Armas fled Cuba by raft, years passed before he saw his family again. They reunited in 2022. “We went six years without seeing each other,” his father said. “Then we came to this country, and now we’re being separated again. Every parent longs to have their children beside them. And that’s why we suffer.”
In Bangui, a recent curfew kept Moreno-De Armas and his roommates indoors for three days. “We’re waiting for God to give us the opportunity to return to the United States,” he said. Fernandez-Garcia said hope existed but disappeared easily.
He still loves America, he said. “I felt what freedom was like for the first time in my life. I felt what it was to dream for the first time in my life, to leave the Cuban bubble of the dictatorship,” Fernandez-Garcia said. “You can’t judge a country by one particular moment.”
But he also thought of the elderly great-uncle and great-aunt in New Jersey who had cared for him in his youth. He had planned to walk with them in Central Park, to watch the sun reflect off the Jersey Shore. “They are older people, and I feel that I have little time left with them,” he said, choking back tears. “And maybe I’m not going to be there when they pass away.”
At her home in New Jersey, his 79-year-old great-aunt, Martha Piedra, said she felt helpless. “I’m an old woman of 79 years with a whole lot of illnesses, so just imagine. What am I going to be able to do? I can’t do anything,” she said, her words dissolving into tears. On the phone, his great-uncle’s voice trembled as he remembered the cap and the calls. “I hope that he comes and brings it to me someday,” Díaz said, according to NPR, and Piedra urged him to come back quickly.