Press Release
Published on August 21, 2026
Washington D.C.—Over the last 24 hours, ICE Flight Monitor, housed at Human Rights First, has tracked multiple forced third country transfers from the United States to Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Paraguay, as well as flights deporting Mexicans to Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. This represents an alarming escalation of the Trump administration’s cruel and unlawful mass deportation campaign.
On August 20, ICE Flight Monitor tracked an ICE Air Flight that arrived in Monrovia, Liberia, at 12:45 pm local time. This flight, which originated in Alexandria, Louisiana, with a refueling stop in Dakar, Senegal, marks the first forced third country transfer to Liberia under a bilateral agreement with the United States. The flight arrived in Liberia with the first group of 15 third country nationals from the United States, including people from Latin American and Caribbean countries.
After stopping in Liberia, the deportation flight continued on to forcibly transfer third country nationals to Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon, arriving at 8:50pm local time and just after midnight local time on August 21st. More than 60 non-Equatoguinean refugees and torture survivors have been forcibly sent to Equatorial Guinea since November 2025 – upon arrival, they are detained in a decommissioned hotel, where they have been subjected to abuse by guards. Many of those removed to Equatorial Guinea have been sent onward to the very places from which they fled, despite having a grant of protection from a U.S. immigration judge protecting them from removal to their home country.
“Since 2025, ICE Flight Monitor has tracked over 100 flights carrying third country nationals to countries other than their own, and we have witnessed the horrific abuses to which people are subjected upon arrival. In recent months, we have tracked first-time flights to the Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Dominica and now Liberia,” said Savi Arvey, Director of Policy, Refugee & Immigrant Rights at Human Rights First. “We are extremely concerned about the egregious violations of people’s due process rights when they are summarily removed to a third country; the conditions to which people are subjected upon arrival; and the very real risk people face of being sent onward from those countries to the very places from which they fled.”
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To speak with Savi Arvey, please contact press@humanrightsfirst.org.
For more information on flight tracking, visit ICE Flight Monitor, which uses publicly available aviation data to track U.S. immigration enforcement flights operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and partner agencies. Founded on the methodology pioneered by researcher Tom Cartwright, the project provides transparent, data-driven reporting to strengthen accountability and inform the public about the human and democratic costs of mass deportation policies.
For more information on third country agreements with more than 35 countries, visit Banished by Bargain: Third Country Deportation Watch, a joint project between Human Rights First and Refugees International that tracks the increasing scale of forced third country transfers.
