On Friday, the Trump administration deported an Iranian woman -- a pro-democracy activist who had fled the regime she once risked her life to oppose -- along with nearly two dozen other asylum seekers, to the Central African Republic, a country so dangerous that the United States government instructs its own citizens not to travel there "for any reason," and advises any American who does to leave DNA samples with a medical provider beforehand, so that their family might one day identify their remains.
The woman, whose name her lawyer is withholding to shield her from the regime she fled, had done everything the law asks of someone seeking refuge. She came to the United States and applied for asylum. The government dismissed that claim under a Trump-era rule that a federal court struck down weeks later, in May, as unlawful and "arbitrary and capricious." But her protection never rested on that claim alone. An American immigration judge granted her withholding of removal -- a status harder to win than asylum itself -- after finding it "more likely than not" that she would be persecuted and possibly killed if returned to Iran.
So the Trump administration did not send her back to Iran. It simply found another dangerous country to send her to instead -- one where she has no ties, no language, and no one -- and made sure she could not stop it. Her lawyer, Emily Trostle, says her client was not told where she was being taken until the day before the flight, and that the Department of Homeland Security brushed aside her requests for the woman to speak with an asylum officer.
"They have absolutely no connection to this place. In all of my filings I submitted tons of information about how this was super dangerous," Trostle said. "Despite being granted withholding of removal, these individuals are being removed from the United States and abandoned in a country where they have no status, no connection and no support network. We fear they will ultimately be forced to return to the countries they originally fled."
The Department of Homeland Security, for its part, insists that everyone it deports receives "full due process" -- a claim difficult to square with the deportation of a woman an American judge had expressly ordered protected.
What makes this deportation grotesque is not only where she was sent, but by whom. This is a woman who risked her life advocating for democracy in Iran, deported by an administration that, only months ago, justified going to war with that very same regime in the language of liberation. As the bombs began falling in February, President Trump addressed himself directly to the Iranian people: "the hour of your freedom is at hand." The administration pointed repeatedly to the Iranian government's brutal repression of dissidents and its violent treatment of women and girls as part of its case for war.
Yet now, as the same administration signs a ceasefire deal with Iran, none of those aims have been realized: the theocracy still stands, Iranians are no freer than before, and the lives of women remain unchanged.
The most consequential result of Trump's war against Iran was to kill the country's 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, only to see power pass dynastically to his hardline son, Mojtaba -- a cleric never elected to any office, who now commands the Revolutionary Guard and holds final say over every matter of state. One aging religious authoritarian was traded for his younger, equally hardline son.
And now the administration has taken one of those very dissidents and discarded her in one of the three poorest countries in the world.
"It's hard to fathom how deeply evil this is," said Senator Chris Murphy. "We have people running our country who get sick pleasure from sending women fleeing violence in Iran to an African country in the middle of a brutal civil war."
The deportation is no aberration. The United States has deemed almost no one worthy of protection, because the Trump administration has effectively dismantled the American asylum and refugee system entirely. On his first day back in office, the president suspended refugee admissions outright. The annual ceiling was then cut to 7,500, the lowest in the program's history, and reserved almost exclusively for a single group: white South Africans.
White Afrikaners are welcomed with open arms. An Iranian woman a federal judge found to be in fear of her life is put on a midnight flight to the Central African Republic.
The Central African Republic is a country the State Department places under its most severe warning -- Level 4, "Do not travel" -- citing armed conflict, kidnapping, landmines, and terrorism. American government employees stationed there are forbidden from bringing their families, required to move through the capital in armored vehicles, and placed under curfew. The country has almost no functioning medical system; the State Department flatly warns that "there are no ambulance or emergency medical services" and that access to even basic medicines is limited.
What happens to her now is unknown. For months, the administration has been quietly striking deals with some of the poorest and most unstable nations across Africa -- at least nine of them -- to take in people it is barred by court order from returning to their own countries, because judges have ruled them unsafe. The logic is its own indictment: forbidden from sending these people into danger at home, the U.S. government is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to send them into danger somewhere else.
The arrangement with the Central African Republic was reached only weeks ago, its terms undisclosed, with a government so dysfunctional that it depends on Russian mercenaries for its own survival. Ali Rahnama, who heads the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund and has been in contact with some of the deportees, called sending Iranians there "a potentially fatal action," pointing in particular to the close ties between the country's government and Moscow -- a steadfast ally of Tehran. Advocates fear that even if the activist survives the harsh conditions there, she could eventually be pushed from the Central African Republic back to Iran after all -- the very outcome an American court expressly forbade.
For generations, whatever its failures, the United States held to a single principle: that it would not turn away those fleeing persecution, that it would be, as Americans long told themselves, a refuge and a light. Trump extinguished that principle on his first day in office. What it looks like in practice became clear last week on a darkened airfield in Louisiana, in the deportation of a woman whose only offense was to believe in the very freedoms this country claimed to be bombing her homeland to defend.
To help those being targeted by these policies -- and to push back against the policies themselves -- here are a few places to start:
--> The Iranian American Legal Defense Fund (IALDF) advocates for Iranian asylum seekers facing deportation to third countries -- learn how to support their work at https://www.ialdf.org
--> The International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) is leading the legal fight against the administration's refugee and asylum restrictions, including its prioritization of white Afrikaners over all other refugees -- support their work at https://refugeerights.org
--> To learn more about the Trump administration's third country deportations, often of legally protected asylum seekers, visit https://www.thirdcountrydeportationwatch.org/
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