The Trump administration carried out a record number of deportation flights last month to countries that have agreed to take nationals other than their own.
These so-called third country removal flights are a Trump-era practice that forces immigrants and asylum seekers to countries they have no ties to. Often, these deportees have been granted protective orders by a judge in the U.S. that prevent them from being sent back to their home countries because of specific dangers they’d face there.
The advocacy group Human Rights First says last month, they tracked 16 of these flights to 13 countries. Liberia, Burundi and Saint Lucia accepted other countries’ deportees for the first time under new deals with the U.S.
As the Arizona Daily Star reported, earlier this year an Arizona man originally from Egypt who’d been in the U.S. since he was 4 was sent to Equatorial Guinea.
He was arrested there this week, the Daily Star said, after telling the paper about abuse he and other deportees had undergone while imprisoned in a decommissioned hotel in the country.
The advocacy group's ICE Flight Tracker releases data on ICE removal flights every month. August showed 325 removal flights to 40 countries all told, an increase the group says is largely due to a rise in the number of deportation flights to Mexico.
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Thousands of refugees in the U.S. lost health coverage on Oct. 1 as new Medicaid eligibility rules took effect. In Arizona, unlike in most states, even children and pregnant women are being dropped. -
On Monday, dozens of agents swarmed a stretch of private land where the activists had been camped in and around a centuries-old cottonwood tree. Contractors tore down the tree and agents made multiple arrests. -
New research shows the ancient site is much older than previously thought. In fact, it’s now confirmed to be the oldest known scientifically dated geoglyph in the Americas, 2,000 years older than the first Pyramids built in Egypt. -
Protesters have been camped out in a plot of private ranch land in Lochiel for over two months now, trying to block wall construction as it neared a towering cottonwood tree that was the last of a grove slated for destruction to make way for two, parallel steel bollard walls. -
Ahmed Soliman has no ties to Equatorial Guinea. The 30-year-old man was born in Egypt and brought to the United States. when he was just 4 years old. He grew up in Phoenix. Now he’s believed to be in a hospital in the African nation.
