She fled Iran. America sent her to Africa

American Deportation Flights Are Landing in Countries No One Expected

Healfromzero.com – The small screen bolted to the back of the seat in front of her displayed a destination she had never seen on a map. By then, the plane was already taxiing. Nika — a pseudonym she adopted because she fears for her own life and that of her family back home — sat handcuffed and shackled among 17 other migrants, including nationals of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Georgia, bound for the Central African Republic. She had been told, weeks earlier, to show up at a Department of Homeland Security office in California for what she believed was a routine administrative meeting. What she walked into was an arrest. What she walked out of, three days later, was a deportation flight.

The episode, which unfolded on the evening of June 11, is one thread in a rapidly expanding pattern: the Trump administration is routing migrants who cannot legally be sent back to their countries of origin toward third nations with which Washington has quietly negotiated transfer agreements. The mechanism functions as a workaround. Federal judges have repeatedly blocked the government from returning certain migrants to places where they face persecution, torture, or execution. Rather than litigate each case individually, the administration has inked dozens of bilateral arrangements with countries that can scarcely be called safe havens, and it is now using those channels to move people out of the United States.

The Woman Behind the File

Nika spent much of her adolescence on the streets of Iran, protesting against the Islamic Republic. The cost was personal and brutal. She lost friends to state violence; others remain imprisoned. Her own fear of returning is not abstract.

“I lost too much of my friends. They [the Islamic Republic] killed them. And some of them are still in prison,” she said, tears breaking through her composure. “I know if I was in Iran, they’re going to kill me.”

That fear had been formally recognized by an American court. Nika holds a protection order — a judicial directive intended to bar removal to a country where the migrant faces a credible threat of persecution. Until recently, deportation of individuals carrying such orders was exceedingly rare. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last year on a platform of mass removal, that rarity has evaporated.

A War, a Crackdown, and a Closed Door

Nika’s story intersects with a dramatic rupture in US-Iran relations. Earlier this year, Iran was engulfed in widespread anti-government protests. The regime responded with an unprecedented crackdown that killed thousands. President Trump urged demonstrators to “take over your institutions” and declared, “help is on its way.” On the final day of February, the United States and Israel launched a military campaign against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and striking targets across the country.

Nika followed every development from American soil. She permitted herself to imagine that the upheaval might mean the end of the regime and, eventually, a homecoming. In practice, her fate had already been sealed. After an initial detention at the border and months in ICE custody, she had been granted a brief period of freedom in California. The DHS notice that summoned her to the June meeting was, in effect, the final administrative step in a decision made weeks before she ever read the letter.

Her immigration lawyer, Sahar Jalili Pawelski, attempted to pull her off the flight. The effort failed.

“I remember when the flight took off, I just sat on the floor, called my mom and cried. I live those moments. You know what that person must’ve been feeling. The loneliness she must have felt,” Pawelski recalled.

The Policy Architecture

The administration’s top anti-immigration voice, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, has framed the approach in blunt terms: “America’s doors are closed, fully, to asylum seekers.” Homeland Security has defended the practice in writing, telling CNN that every person deported received due process and held a final order of removal.

“These third country agreements, which ensure due process under the U.S. Constitution, are essential to the safety of our homeland and the American people. We are applying the law as written. If a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.”

Critics note that the arrangement sidesteps the very protections the judicial system was designed to guarantee. A protection order bars return to the country of origin; it does not, under current administrative practice, bar transfer to a third country with which the migrant has no prior connection, no language skills, and no social network.

Life in Bangui

More than two months after landing in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, Nika describes a daily existence defined by fear. She rarely leaves her apartment block. When necessity forces her out — groceries, basic supplies — she says local police have repeatedly stopped her, demanded bribes, and threatened arrest if she refused to pay. The police deny these accounts.

She also spent a period at a local hospital after contracting malaria, a disease endemic to the region and one she had never encountered in California.

“I couldn’t believe I’m here,” Nika said. “Really, for me this is unbelievable.”

The US State Department’s own travel advisory recommends against all travel to the Central African Republic, citing ongoing insecurity, limited medical infrastructure, and weak rule of law. Nika arrived there not as a tourist or diplomat but as a passenger on a government-arranged deportation flight, with no choice of destination and no prior notice of where she would land.

She had once told herself, in the first hours after reaching American soil, that she was safe. That she could build one new life. The sentence, she now says, lasted less than two years.