For 30 years, 58-year-old mother, grandmother, and nurse Rabiatu Kuyateh lived in Maryland. Originally from Sierra Leone, where she had fled torture and war, she never became a U.S. citizen, but maintained her work permit. But in July 2025, her regular check-in with Customs and Immigration Enforcement didn’t go as usual.
Instead, ICE detained Kuyateh in Maryland before moving her to Louisiana, where she remained for months. In September, a judge granted an order confirming she couldn’t return to Sierra Leone. Still, with no time to legally oppose, Kuyateh was shackled on a Ghana-bound plane for 10 hours. Then in November, a shocking video of her went viral.
Ghana is one of several countries paid, pressured, and otherwise participating in U.S. third-country deportations, an “alternative” for deportees if returning to their original country is “impracticable, inadvisable, or impossible. In the video, Ghanaian workers are shown dragging Kutayeh across the floor to put her on a bus to Sierra Leone.
Under the escalating Trump administration, other deportees have been detained abroad, forced back to their birth countries, or inexplicably lost. Disrupting communities, breaking up families, and discarding community members like Rabiatu Kuyateh, all while prioritizing immigrants facing “anti-white discrimination,” tells us everything we need to know.
U.S. anti-immigration efforts are about preserving whiteness and racist national identity. And a country founded on Black enslavement and Indigenous displacement has no right —or tradition—of order to return to.