Photograph provided by Honduran Brayan Sánchez, taken with his mobile phone, showing the area where he lives with other Latinos after being deported from the United States, in Bangui, Central African Republic. EFE/Brayan Sánchez
Author: Pedro Pablo Cortés
Miami (USA), Aug 6 (EFE) – Migrants from Honduras, Cuba, and Ecuador denounced on Thursday that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported them “by force” to the Central African Republic without prior notice, and are seeking help to return, arguing that “all their rights were violated.”
Honduran Brayan Sánchez, who managed to smuggle a cell phone into the detention center, explained in a video call interview with EFE from Bangui, the capital of the African country, that US authorities sent him and his four Cuban companions and an Ecuadorian to an unknown location.
“ICE just told me: ‘Everything about you is closed now,’ but by force, it wasn’t voluntary at all. They never mentioned Africa to me. If they had mentioned it, I would have gone to El Salvador, I would have gone to Mexico in the end, but definitely not Africa. Never of my own free will. Never,” he stated from the place where he is being held.
Sanchez, who worked as a truck driver and owns a pressure washing and painting corporation, said he was arrested on May 13 in Florida, from where he was taken to sites in Colorado, Arizona, California and Texas, where he met his Latino colleagues and discovered on July 30 that they would be sent to Africa.
At the last detention site, he recounted, two ICE officers arrived who “threatened” them and told them: “Tomorrow you are going to leave on the flight and if you don’t get on the plane, we are going to beat you up.”
“But why are you sending us there?” I asked them. And they said, “We don’t know, we’re just going there.” At that point, we had no way out. It was complicated; our rights were violated. The flight lasted 21 hours. We made our first stop in Senegal, and then they took us to Nigeria and then to the Central African Republic,” he said.
Using his mobile phone, he has documented the area where he is being held in Bangui, where he says they are in a hotel, that local authorities have asked them not to leave, and that they will be granted a visa to remain there.
The Honduran man recorded a video alongside Ecuadorian Mauricio Alvarado and Cubans Arístides Fernández, Omar Rodríguez, and Almario Moreno, while the other has not been publicly identified, to ask Florida congressmen and activists to help them return to the United States.
“We are asking the congresswomen of South Florida, Maria Elvira (Salazar), and everyone who can see this video, to please make it go viral, to hear our voice, because this has been an injustice and we are having a very hard time,” Fernández says in the message.
Deportations to Africa
The fact reflects the increasing deportations of migrants by the Donald Trump Administration to third countries in Africa, with agreements to accept them in Rwanda, South Sudan, Eswatini, Uganda, Ghana, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the Institute of International and Strategic Relations.
The administration stepped up these efforts after a Supreme Court ruling in June 2025 authorized such deportations. Since then, it has “deported people to unsafe conditions without due process and with less than 24 hours’ notice,” the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) stated.
Sánchez, who arrived in the United States in 2016, maintains that he had a court order preventing his deportation.
“I spoke with lawyers, they tell me: ‘no, you have to be returned because all your rights have been violated, but the judge still doesn’t know what’s happening to you, they’ve grabbed you by force, they’ve brought you here by force.'”
“These people want to experiment on us and keep sending immigrants here,” he said.
Although the Honduran government has publicly stated that it is monitoring the case and would support his “voluntary return,” Sánchez commented that he cannot return because the reason he left is that his father was killed and his uncles threatened him.
So far, ICE has not responded to EFE’s request for information about his case.
