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May 1, 2026 / 11:56 AM EDT
/ CBS News
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When Jose Yugar-Cruz arrived at the Arizona-Mexico border in the July heat nearly two years ago, he told a federal court, he immediately turned himself into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and asked for asylum. In January 2025, though he was denied asylum, he became one of about 4,000 migrants last year to be granted a court order preventing their deportation to their home country because a judge found it more likely than not that they would face torture or persecution if returned, immigration court data shows.But the supposed victory was followed by a yearlong legal battle during which he remained detained. On Monday, a federal judge cleared the way for ICE to deport Yugar-Cruz to the Democratic Republic of Congo. "I feel truly, truly devastated by what is happening to me," Yugar-Cruz, 37, told CBS News from ICE detention in Iowa, speaking in Spanish. "It is a country I don't know, I have no family there, I don't speak their language — as far as I understand I think it's French. I don't know what the process will be like there, I don't know if I'll continue to be detained.""I keep thinking it's a nightmare that I will wake up from," he added. Yugar-Cruz spoke in a joint interview with CBS News and The Minnesota Star Tribune.A withholding of removal order like the one Yugar-Cruz received doesn't create a pathway to legal residence in the United States and allows for third-country deportations. But under previous administrations, the difficulty of deporting migrants to countries they aren't from meant that most who were granted such protections would end up staying in the U.S. indefinitely, immigration policy experts told CBS News. "The Trump administration is trying to speed up the process and in some ways trying to go out of their way to make the process punitive for migrants to try to send a message," said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
