When immigrants can't be deported to their home countries, the U.S. sometimes sends them to other countries. But some deportees end up in places where U.S.
Page T30From§Eachthe evening edition — 26 October 2026
ICE deports Texas father to Ghana, which puts them on a flight to the country a judge banned.
As it ran on the front
A Texas father spent months fighting deportation to the one country a U.S. judge said could get them killed: Mali. Ghana's airport read that paperwork differently.
The State Department warns Americans not to travel to several of the places the agency has been treating as deportation receiving docks all year. In September, CNN found the Central African Republic had taken in dozens of men with protection orders just like this one, the same month CBS traveled to Liberia and found deportees who said they had never heard of the country before ICE put them on the plane.…
…(cont) The common thread through Liberia, the Central African Republic, and now Ghana-by-way-of-Mali is the same missing document: a signed agreement showing the receiving government actually agreed to take someone, and agreed to keep them. Nobody has produced one. Not the Ghanaian government, not the State Department, not ICE. The only paper trail that exists is the agency's own file, and the only reason the public has even that much is that CBS News got it — not ICE, not a court, not a congressional committee with subpoena power, CBS.
That is the whole mechanism now. A court rules a person cannot go to Mali. The agency says, on paper, they're going to Ghana instead. Ghana's own officials, answering to nobody in Washington, decide otherwise within the same day. And when a reporter finally asks who signed what, the only answer on file is the one the agency wrote about itself, filed where only a subpoena or a leak will ever find it. The court order didn't fail. It just stopped being able to follow this father once they left the room.
“They don't need to deport you to the country that will kill you — they just deport you to the country standing next to it, and let that government do it for them. Every time, the only proof of what got promised is the paperwork ICE wrote about itself, and the only reason we even see it is somebody leaked it to CBS. That is not a mistake happening three times in two months — Central African Republic, Liberia, now Mali by way of Ghana — that is a business model, and the product is a father who legally cannot be sent to the one place they keep ending up.”
“Look, Ghana is a sovereign country — what happens on their tarmac is not a State Department matter. Once they're off U.S. soil, that's between them and, uh, whoever is holding the clipboard there. The agreement exists, I've seen references to the agreement — okay, I have not personally seen the agreement, nobody has seen the agreement, but the agency would not write down that a country agreed to something if it did not, agencies do not just... did I say that? That does not sound like me.”
The receipts
A Texas dad was deported to Ghana, where he says local officials forced him onto a flight to Mali. The problem? A U.S.
When immigrants can't be deported to their home countries, the U.S. sometimes sends them to other countries. But some deportees end up in places where U.S.
· U.S. Deports Thousands to Countries They Don't Know Under Secretive "Third Country" Deal from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· Inside the Business of Trump’s Third-Country Deportations from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
· Deported to Africa: Migrants describe being sent to a place they "had never heard of" from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.