DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Homosexuality is illegal in Morocco and is punishable by up to three years in prison. But it was violence from her family that forced Farah, a 21-year-old lesbian, to flee the country.
However, after making the long journey to the United States and being expelled from a third country by the Trump administration, Farah said she is now back in Morocco and in hiding.
“It’s hard to live and work because I worry about being tracked again by my family,” she told The Associated Press, a rare testimony from someone who was deported through a third country despite being granted a protection order by a U.S. immigration judge. “But there’s nothing I can do. I have to work.”
She asked to be named only because she feared persecution. The Associated Press has seen her protective order, and lawyers have verified portions of her account.
Farah said she was beaten when her family and her partner’s family discovered their relationship before she fled. She was kicked out of her home and fled to another city with her partner. She said her family found her and tried to kill her.
Through a friend, she and her partner heard about the opportunity to obtain Brazilian visas and flew there with the intention of reaching the United States where they had friends there. She traveled several weeks from Brazil, crossing six countries, to the U.S. border, where she sought asylum.
“You get into really scary situations,” she recalled. “When we got to the (U.S. border) it felt like all the trouble was worth it and we had achieved our goal.”
They arrive in early 2025. But Farah says instead of finding the freedom to be herself, she was detained for nearly a year, first in Arizona and then in Louisiana.
“It was very cold,” she said of the detention. “And we only have very thin blankets.” Medical services are inadequate, she said.
She was denied asylum, but in August she received an order of protection from a U.S. immigration judge, who ruled she could not be deported to Morocco because it would endanger her life. Her partner was deported after being refused asylum and protection orders.
With three days left before her release hearing, Farah said, she was handcuffed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and put on a plane to an African country she had never visited: Cameroon. She was placed in a detention center.
“They asked me if I wanted to stay in Cameroon and I told them I couldn’t stay in Cameroon and risk my life in a place where I would still be threatened,” she said. She was flown to Morocco.
Most deportees have protection orders
She is one of dozens of people confirmed by the Trump administration for deportation from the U.S. to third countries despite having legal protections from U.S. immigration judges. The true number is unknown.
The U.S. government uses third-country deportations to force immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally to leave on their own, saying they could end up “in any number of third countries.”
Farah is being held in a detention facility in Yaounde, Cameroon’s capital. According to Joseph Awah Fru, a lawyer representing Farah, the detention facility currently holds 15 deportees from various African countries who arrived on two flights, but none of them are Cameroonian.
Alma David, an immigration attorney with U.S.-based Novo Legal Group, said eight deportees on the first flight in January, including Farah, received protective orders from judges. He helped deportees and verified Farah’s case. The AP spoke to a woman from Ghana and a woman from Congo, who both said they had protective orders but spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
Another flight on Monday carried eight more passengers. Three freelance journalists covering the deportation of Cameroon for the Associated Press were briefly detained there.
David said deporting people to third countries where they could be sent home was effectively a legal “loophole”.
“By deporting them to Cameroon and denying them any opportunity to contest being sent to a country whose government hopes to quietly return them to a country where they face grave danger, the United States is violating not only their due process rights, but our own immigration laws, our obligations under international treaties, and even DHS’s own procedures,” David said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security earlier confirmed that some people were deported to Cameroon in January.
“We are enforcing the law as written. If a judge determines that illegal aliens have no right to be in this country, we will deport them. Period,” the statement said, claiming that third-country agreements “ensure due process” under the U.S. Constitution.
When asked about the expulsion of Cameroon, the State Department told The Associated Press on Friday that it “does not comment on the details of our diplomatic communications with other governments.” It did not answer further questions.
Cameroon’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Impossible choice’
Farah was one of the first two deportees to return to Morocco.
“They were faced with two impossible choices,” David said, claiming that applying for asylum was not explicitly listed as one of them. “That’s before lawyers get to them.”
She said IOM staff at the facility did not indicate to them that there were viable options other than returning to their home countries.
Frew said he was not allowed access to the deportees. He said he was told by the assistant country director of the International Organization for Migration, a U.N.-affiliated organization, that he would have to apply to speak with them. Fru plans to do it on Monday.
The International Organization for Migration told The Associated Press that it is “aware of the deportations of migrants from the United States to some African countries,” adding that it “works with people who face difficult decisions about whether to return to their countries of origin.” The company said its role is to provide accurate information about options and ensure “anyone who chooses to return does so voluntarily”.
The facility in Yaoundé is managed by Cameroonian authorities, the International Organization for Migration said. It did not answer further questions.
African countries get paid millions of dollars
Cameroon is one of at least seven African countries that have agreements with the United States to receive deported third-country nationals, including South Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda, Swaziland, Ghana and Equatorial Guinea.
Some have received millions of dollars in returns, according to documents released by the State Department. Details of other agreements, including with Cameroon, have not yet been released.
The Trump administration has spent at least $40 million deporting about 300 immigrants to countries outside their home country, according to a report released last week by Democratic staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Forty-seven third-country agreements are in various stages of negotiation, according to internal management documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
Farah said it was difficult to hear U.S. officials refer to people like her as a threat in Morocco.
“America was built on immigrants and immigrant labor, so we’re obviously not all a threat,” she said. “What was done to me was unfair. A normal deportation would have been fair, but to be deported in this way after having been through so much and losing so much is just cruel.”
___
The report has been corrected to say the two women interviewed by The Associated Press were on the first flight in January, not last week’s flight. It also corrected the situation in which eight of the original deportees had protection orders, while the ninth was stateless.
