DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — It’s an existence that Congo’s president has described as “living the Congolese dream.” For the 15 Latin Americans deported to the African nation under the Trump administration’s widely criticized crackdown on migrants, it feels more like a nightmare.The Associated Press spoke with one, a 29-year old Colombian woman who confirmed what people deported to other African nations have described: A shackled deportation despite a U.S. immigration judge’s protection order. Confinement in a hotel with supervised outings.And an impossible choice: Return to a home country with the risk of persecution or stay in Congo, a country the Colombian woman had never heard of before she arrived.“They treat us like we’re children,” she said as their three-month Congolese visas near an end, with no plan in sight.“What would one do in a completely unknown place, without a place to live and without knowing what to do?” she added, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.It was not immediately clear what a new U.S. court ruling, saying the U.S. likely broke the law by deporting a fellow Colombian to Congo, will mean for her.
A United Nations-affiliated group plays a central roleIn her interview from the hotel in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, where she and other deportees are held, the woman gave new details about the central role that a United Nations-affiliated body, the International Organization for Migration, is playing.She said deportees are allowed to leave the hotel about once a week and only accompanied by IOM staff. When they shop at a supermarket or withdraw money they are quickly ushered back to their vehicle, with IOM staff never out of sight.“They choose where we go and what we buy,” she said.At the hotel, she said, IOM staff have organized activities like painting, music and volleyball but many deportees have stopped participating, bored with the routine. She goes for meals and remains in her room otherwise, making late-night calls to her 10-year-old daughter in Colombia and worrying when she will see her again.
