An Iowa City woman granted protection from persecution in Ivory Coast will likely end up back in that country after a third-country deportation from the U.S.
Fatou Traore lived in Iowa City for two decades. An immigration judge granted her a “withholding of removal” from her native Ivory Coast because she was likely to be harmed there.
In September, Traore's family said she was pulled out of her car by unmarked immigration officials on her way to work at a University of Iowa hospital. She was deported to Sierra Leone on Monday.
New York Immigrant Coalition’s Rosanna Eugenio, who’s part of Traore’s legal team, said Traore is unlikely to stay there.
“We do know that in some of these countries that they’re being sent to, the governments of those countries swiftly repatriate them to the country where they’ve been harmed," Eugenio said. "If we know that people are going to be sent back to where they’ve proven that they need protection from, then we’re sending them back to being harmed by adding this transit stop in the middle."
The U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing whether third-country deportations are legal and is expected to hear arguments in December.
"It's kind of hard to process that someone could be here for years, decades, with protection, working, having gone through the process ... and then from one moment to the next, they're in a country they've never been to and that country is knowingly sending people back to the country where they've been persecuted," Eugenio said.
Withholding of removal doesn't open a pathway to citizenship — the only humanitarian relief status that does so is asylum, Eugenio said. But she said withholding of removal requires the seeker to prove they have at least a 50% chance of facing violence, persecution or torture in their home country, while asylum doesn't require that high of a risk.
Eugenio and the legal team were trying to reopen Traore's case while she was still in the U.S., but she said that as she was trying to navigate in-person filing, she discovered Traore was no longer in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility.
"That usually potentially means [she's] on a plane," Eugenio said. "That was confirmed the following morning."
An ICE flight monitor showed a plane landing in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on Oct. 13, "forcibly removing third-country nationals there from the U.S."
"Can you technically say that, 'Well, we're not responsible for it because we just dropped the person off?'" Eugenio said.
