Moussa Diawara spent nearly half his life building a home in suburban Houston — a wife, two kids, a steady gig driving for Uber — before immigration agents showed up outside his door after a night shift on July 11. Weeks later, he says he ended up homeless and hiding in Mali, a country a U.S. immigration judge had ruled he could not be sent back to because he was likely to face persecution there.
Diawara, 57, came to the United States on a tourist visa at age 32, overstayed it, and later applied for refugee protection, according to CBS News. In 2012, a U.S. immigration judge ruled he could not be deported to Mali but said the government could pursue sending him to a safe third country instead, a status known as withholding of removal. He has no criminal record, converted to Christianity, and says he feared persecution if returned to Mali, which CBS describes as a Muslim-majority country facing an Islamist insurgency.
For years, that order held. Diawara lived with his wife and two U.S. citizen children, 16-year-old Corey and 12-year-old Chloe, and worked nights as an Uber driver. That ended on July 11, when he finished a shift and found ICE agents waiting at his suburban Houston home. He spent three weeks in ICE detention in Texas, during which he says he was unable to speak with his lawyer or a judge.
A Flight to Ghana, Then Days Later, Mali
On July 31, ICE deported Diawara to Ghana — a country, CBS reports, he had never visited and had no ties to whatsoever. His deportation flight had departed Texas the day before, carrying 63 people and making stops in Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic before landing in Ghana. Within days of arriving, Diawara says Ghanaian officials forced him onto a flight to Mali, the very country the U.S. immigration judge had barred as his destination years earlier.
Diawara says he and other deportees were held in a hotel guarded by armed personnel and were not allowed to make phone calls, leaving him unable to reach his wife, his lawyer, or anyone else. When 60 Minutes first contacted him in August, he was homeless and hiding in Mali, saying Ghanaian officials had left him there without money or identification. After several weeks, he says he escaped to an undisclosed country with help from local truckers; he has asked that the destination remain unnamed for his safety.
Back in Texas, his wife Barbara Diawara, a registered nurse, has been waiting for him. She says she tries not to cry in front of their children and works to stay strong for them, while their son Corey has said the house feels empty without his father. Attorney Reuben S. Kerben has asked a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to order Diawara's return to the United States.
Paper Trail Points to Mali All Along
Diawara told CBS he believes the U.S. government knew Ghana would send him onward to Mali. He points to a flight medical document listing his destination as SHRC Mali — SHRC standing for Special High Risk Charter — along with both of his DHS-issued bag tags, which also listed Mali as the destination. He says he acknowledges the U.S. had the legal right to deport him, just not to Mali specifically.
James Percival, representing the administration's position in the CBS report, said Diawara was flown to Ghana, not Mali, and said he knew of no cases of Ghana sending people onward against their will. A DHS spokesperson said the bag tags were produced by contractors not involved in determining the actual destination and called the medical form a clerical error. DHS said Ghana had provided diplomatic assurances for Diawara's safety and questioned the credibility of his persecution claims; the Ghanaian government declined to comment to CBS.
Diawara's Flight Was Far From Alone
A 60 Minutes review of Diawara's flight found that 62% of the 63 deportees aboard had no criminal record, 19% had traffic violations, and 19% had been charged with or convicted of crimes. The network reached 19 of those 63 people, and 17 said they were later sent against their will to countries where U.S. judges had specifically ruled they should not be returned — including, per named destinations cited in the report, Niger, Mali, Nigeria, Gambia and Guinea. 60 Minutes also found that dozens of others on Diawara's flight held the same withholding-of-removal protection he did.
Diawara's case fits a pattern documented elsewhere. Reuters reported that Rabbiatu Kuyateh, a nurse who had lived in the U.S. for 30 years and held a withholding-of-removal order protecting her from return to Sierra Leone, was deported to Ghana on November 5 and says she was detained at a hotel for six days before Ghanaian officials dragged her onto a flight to Sierra Leone. Reuters found that more than 30 third-country nationals were deported to Ghana last year and that at least 22 of them were sent to their home countries despite holding U.S. court-ordered protection against that outcome; Equatorial Guinea separately sent home at least three deportees who had similar protection.
Immigration attorney Meredyth Yoon has said she believes U.S. officials knew what Ghana was doing to deportees and that the practice violates international law. The report notes that the U.S. government was warned about Ghana's conduct in a 2025 lawsuit, yet sent 10 additional third-country deportation flights to Ghana afterward.
A System Spanning Tens of Thousands
The scale extends well beyond one flight. ICE has deported roughly 25,000 people to dozens of third countries that receive millions of dollars in U.S. aid or other benefits in exchange, according to the CBS report. Separately, USCRI's deportation tracker found that more than 22,000 people had been deported to at least 26 countries as of August, with the executive branch pursuing agreements with more than 50 countries in total.
Human Rights Watch found that the United States expelled more than 500 people to African countries that were not their countries of origin between January 2025 and early August 2026. The group documented that people sent to Eswatini, Ghana and South Sudan were arbitrarily detained and faced ill-treatment, and that Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Ghana sent some deportees onward to places where they faced risk of persecution or torture — a violation, the group said, of the international principle against returning people to danger. Most of these transfers, the report noted, were not conducted under formal, public safe-third-country agreements.
A Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report, commissioned by ranking member Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, issued a 30-page critique of the program, with Shaheen saying it sends taxpayer money to foreign governments while ignoring human costs and potentially damaging diplomatic relationships. Percival countered that third-country deportations are widely misunderstood, that the administration is simply following laws passed by Congress, and that some deportees did commit serious crimes. He noted that countries including Eswatini and South Sudan have agreed to accept deportees with criminal records — citing cases involving first-degree murder, sexual assault, kidnapping and armed robbery — when those people's home countries refused to take them back. He said he did not know what proportion of detained and deported people were violent offenders, and argued that prior administrations had failed to protect Americans by allowing criminals to remain free rather than pursuing diplomatic deportation efforts.
Courts Weigh In While the Program Continues
A federal appeals court ruled in September that the administration's third-country deportation policy was unlawful for denying migrants due process. The U.S. Supreme Court has nonetheless allowed the deportations to continue while it prepares to hear the broader legal challenge in December. For Diawara, still separated from his wife and children in Texas, the outcome of that case may determine whether the protection a judge granted him in 2012 is finally honored.
