'They Kept Us Like Animals': Afghan Woman Deported to Africa By Trump Speaks Out

Farzana’s fiancé was a U.S. partner in Afghanistan. She was loaded on a plane full of men and sent to another country with no papers or job prospects.

On August 28, lawyers for a 32-year-old Afghan woman filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order to stop the U.S. government from deporting her. The same day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forced her on a plane to the Central African Republic, with around 40–50 men, and dumped her in the African nation with no identity papers or documents.

Farzana is the fiancée of a man who had applied for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), given to people who assisted the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and now face reprisals from the new Taliban-led government. Both of them entered the U.S. through the southern border in May 2024, filing for asylum with the former President Joe Biden-era CBP One app, and were detained.

Farzana says that she spent "awful" years in ICE detention, explaining that "they kept us like animal[s]." She reports being treated rudely by officers, and says that none of her complaints were taken seriously.

As a last-ditch effort to get herself released from the facility, Farzana filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to challenge the legality of her continued detention. Some Afghans have found freedom after their legal teams filed a writ of habeas corpus, but Farzana's federal defender had no success in the Louisiana legal system.

The day after the government filed a response opposing Farzana's habeas petition, her counsel filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order, likely as an attempt to secure her release or bar her removal, according to the online court docket. That same day, Farzana was flown to the Central African Republic. Three days later, the government submitted their order denying her motion.

Farzana is now living in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, with no job. She says that she is "safe only inside [her] room." Farzana reports that she was given just three months of resettlement support from the United Nations and the host nation.

"The situation here is also dangerous," she says through a messaging app, where she shared a pin confirming her location. "I have no ties, no understanding of culture, even I don't understand the language. Also, I can't return to my country due to Taliban. What is my future?"

This week, she was diagnosed with plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the deadliest variety of malaria. Farzana says she is "hopeless."

The Central African Republic is far from a land of opportunity. In 2023, the World Bank Group stated that the country had the fifth-highest poverty rate in the world, with extreme poverty affecting 70 percent of the population. They found that 90 percent of residents have no electricity. U.N. Women states that "work still needs to be done in the Central African Republic to achieve gender equality."

Of course, Farzana's new place of residence provides women greater access to basic human rights than she might have under the Taliban's gender apartheid system in Afghanistan. The Taliban has issued a total of 166 decrees as of June 2026 restricting women's participation in society. This includes severe restrictions on unaccompanied travel, a ban on speaking in public, strict dress codes and enforcement, being barred from most jobs, being denied access to male doctors, and being forced out of the education system after the sixth grade.

Third-Country Removal as Policy

International law prohibits the practice of "refoulement," returning a refugee to a country where they may be in danger of torture or persecution. But the Trump administration has found a way around that principle through third-country removals, dumping refugees in places where they have never lived.

These refugees often "realize there's nothing for them there. They don't have really firm resettlement. They're allowed to stay there, but the conditions are not conducive to that," says Shawn VanDiver, president of the nonprofit AfghanEvac, describing the third countries as places "in shambles" with no prospects of work or success. "The countries will essentially tell these Afghans, 'OK, I guess you can go home. And that's refoulement by a different name, and it's a really awful situation."

VanDiver tells Reason that he has heard of 20 cases of Afghan third-country removal on Farzana's flight alone, and that his organization is hearing from family members of detainees at facilities "in places like Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana…freaking out because deportations are in fact happening."

Although the Trump administration began using third-country removals on refugees from other countries, Afghans have largely avoided this fate, until now. VanDiver believes that the spate of removals is occurring now because the Trump administration has finally found that the tactic is useful for getting around non-refoulement.

Between November 2025 and April 2026, Equatorial Guinea accepted 14 African migrants in third-country removals from the U.S. Human Rights Research reports that all of these individuals "had previously obtained legal protection in the U.S. against being returned to their countries of origin." In June 2026, Equatorial Guinea forcibly deported six individuals to their home countries, with three being returned after a refusal of admission.

A complaint that Equatorial Guinea violated detainees' international human rights has been filed with the African Commission on Human and People's Rights.

Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer and senior fellow for the Migration Policy Institute, told CNN that in chain refoulement, when a refugee or asylum seeker is sent to a third country from which they will be deported to a home country where they are at risk is also illegal under both domestic and international law.

But an ICE memorandum from July 2025 explains that "if the United States has received diplomatic assurances from the country of removal that aliens removed from the United States will not be persecuted or tortured, and if the Department of State believes those assurances to be credible, the alien may be removed without the need for further procedures."

VanDiver said that when he thinks about former President Ronald Reagan's speech about the U.S. being "a shining city on a hill," he "can't find that in government right now." He explained that "there's nothing humane about it" when the administration sends refugees "to these places for the express purpose of getting them off our books, and then the administration doesn't care what happens to them after."

The Public Sentiment

AfghanEvac and HIAS, a fellow immigration nonprofit, have conducted polling of the American public, targeting both Republicans and Democrats. VanDiver says the nonprofits "felt pretty strongly that what the federal government was doing was not reflective of where the American people stood."

The results are clear: 84 percent of surveyed Americans believe that the U.S. should commit to protecting Afghan allies and their families; 80 percent think that the nation can protect national security and honor its commitments to allies simultaneously; 63 percent are against deporting Afghan allies to countries where they have no ties.

"When you have that much of the country that agrees on something, it's really hard to make the case that the White House is in touch with what the American public wants, that the State Department is in touch with what the American people want," VanDiver says. "They talk about America-first foreign policy and America-first immigration policy, but I have a question about who is America. This poll shows that over 80 percent of the American public believes that we need to take care of these Afghans."