José Yugar-Cruz spent 17 months in a county jail in Muscatine, Iowa, despite never having committed a crime.

Originally from Bolivia, he entered the United States legally at the Arizona border in July 2024, affirmatively approached authorities, and requested asylum. Six months later, a US immigration judge found he had been tortured in Bolivia, would probably face torture again if returned, and barred his removal to his home country. The government did not appeal. Yugar-Cruz was not released for almost a year. Instead, ICE spent months searching unsuccessfully for somewhere else to send him. He finally won his release in December 2025.

But after the United States negotiated a new “Third-Country Removal Agreement” with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country beset by conflict and corruption, ICE placed Yugar-Cruz on the manifest for an April charter flight to Kinshasa. On 8 April, he was redetained at a check-in appointment with ICE. Although a temporary stay kept him off that flight, a federal judge later ruled he could not block a future deportation to the DRC, risking Yugar-Cruz’s removal to a country he has never set foot in. “I don’t know [it], I have no family there, I don’t speak their language,” he said. “I feel like a person who has no value.”

The flight Yugar-Cruz narrowly missed carried 15 South Americans to DRC. They arrived in chains, a routine feature of these flights, where passengers are held in........

© The Guardian