The development raises fresh concerns about Washington’s use of third-country deportation arrangements to remove people who would ordinarily have been allowed to remain in the country under previous administrations.
The exact number of deportees in the latest batch was not disclosed, but Meredyth Yoon, a U.S.-based lawyer connected to one of the cases, said the group arrived in Ghana on Thursday.
The person whose case Yoon is associated with is a Guinean man who holds what is known as “withholding of removal,” a legal protection that, while weaker than asylum, has historically prevented a person’s deportation order from being executed, allowing them to live and work in the United States.
“They could all be deported back to their countries as soon as tomorrow,” Yoon warned, expressing fears that the group would be quickly forwarded from Ghana to their countries of origin.
The Trump administration has argued that it is only legally barred from sending people with such protections to their home countries and not to a third country, a position that rights groups and lawyers have fiercely contested in U.S. courts.
The latest flight comes after at least 42 West Africans arrived in Ghana under the third-country deportation arrangement last year, though Washington and Accra have not made the actual cumulative total public.
Ghana has previously forwarded deportees to neighbouring Togo without documents, including a bisexual Gambian man whose country criminalises same-sex relations, according to U.S. court documents, and previous deportees were held in secret at a military base outside Accra under armed guard.
President Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election on promises of launching what he described as the largest deportation programme of criminals in American history.
Since taking office, he has slashed the country’s asylum and refugee programmes while aggressively pursuing third-country agreements with African nations to accelerate removals.
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