ICE deported Colombian man shielded from return to Colombia to DR Congo under third-country removal deal

On April 15, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed Jorge Andres Cubillos, a Colombian man, from the United States and sent him to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country to which he has no ties. Cubillos had come to the United States in 2018 after threats from a Colombian criminal group and settled in St. Cloud, Florida, with his wife and four children. He applied for asylum, and in 2022 an immigration judge granted him withholding of removal, a form of protection that barred his return to Colombia. The government treated that order as a bar only on removal to Colombia, not on transfer to a different country, and used a new third-country arrangement to send him to the DRC instead.

Cubillos was flagged for removal after ICE lodged an immigration detainer following his arrest earlier in the year on a domestic battery charge in Seminole County; the Department of Homeland Security said the detainer was honored and that ICE removed him on April 15. He was part of the first group of about 15 Latin American migrants — nationals of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru — deported to Congo under a secretive deal with the Trump administration, arriving in Kinshasa on April 17. Attorneys for the group said all of them were believed to hold U.S. immigration-court protections shielding them from return to their home countries.

In Congo, the deportees were held in a lodge-style hotel near Kinshasa's airport while U.S. and Congolese authorities decided what would happen to them. Cubillos, who remained on a temporary visa, said the group was falling ill from the food and the climate and described being cut off from the family he had built in Central Florida. "Now, waking up and knowing that I'm in Africa, far away, so very far away... no, no, it's simply unbelievable," he said. DHS declined to provide further detail about his removal beyond its written statement.

Updates

2026-06-08 — Most of the deported group returned to home countries [4]

By early June 2026, at least eight of the roughly 15 people deported to Congo had left through the International Organization for Migration's Assisted Voluntary Return program, including several Colombians and Peruvians, according to Congolese officials and an attorney for the deportees. Advocates said the migrants felt pressured to abandon the U.S. court protections they had previously won and return to the countries they had fled, because no viable alternative was presented to them. Cubillos was among the deportees who described being effectively confined in the hotel despite being told they were free to leave.