The U.S. is ramping up its "third country" deportation campaign in Africa. CBS News' Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports.
Page A4From§Eachthe noon edition — 31 August 2026
Federalist accuses Democrats of not caring about immigration enforcement; administration deports 100+ people to Africa in 10 days.
As it ran on the front
There's a move you see in every political fight, and it's this: accuse the other side of not caring about a problem while your own side is busy handling it in a way nobody asked about. This week's version: an op-ed accusing Democrats of not seeing unlimited illegal immigration as a problem, filed the same week documents showed the administration deported more than a hundred people to Africa in ten days.
Notice what's missing from that sentence. It doesn't say deported to their home countries. It says Africa — a continent, not a country, standing in for wherever a person could be sent instead of wherever a person is actually from. That's not this desk's inference; that's the framing of the documents themselves.…
…(cont) So while one outlet is out here relitigating who cares more about the border, the actual enforcement apparatus is quietly solving a logistics problem — where to put people when the destination country won't take them back — by picking a continent. A hundred people in ten days is not a debate. It's a flight manifest.
This is the trick, and it works because the argument about who cares is loud and the flight manifest is quiet. Nobody's holding a press conference about the Africa numbers. There's a live discussion, a cable panel, an op-ed about Democratic priorities, and meanwhile the paperwork moves on its own schedule, filed under a different desk entirely.
This reporter isn't going to tell you which of the two stories is more real. Both are real. One of them just has a receipt with a flight count on it, and the other one has a headline with a feeling in it. Put them next to each other and the feeling doesn't hold up as well as the count does.
The kids in the classroom whose parent didn't come home from a routine check-in don't care which cable panel discussed whose priorities that week. They care where the flight went. As of this filing, the flights went to Africa. More than a hundred of them, in ten days.
“They're on cable arguing about who cares more about the border while the administration quietly ships more than a hundred people to a continent, not a country. Watch the flight manifest, not the panel.”
“The removals reflect lawful enforcement of immigration policy, full stop. Where exactly in Africa they're sent is a logistics question, not a — well, it probably matters to the person on the plane, but operationally, it's logistics.”
The receipts
Maybe Democrats haven't learned their lesson on immigration, but hopefully Americans will remember theirs.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.