ICE Is Trying to Send Hundreds of New York’s African Asylum Seekers to a Country They’re Not From

In the courthouse hallway, Modou’s attorney coached him in whispers.

“They’re not going to ask you anything about Senegal,” she told him. “Don’t even bring it up.”

She drilled him on the questions an ICE cross-examiner would likely ask.

“Why are you afraid of going to Uganda if you’ve never even been there?” she posed.

Modou hesitated: “Because I’m a Muslim?” His hands shook. It was Ramadan and he’d been fasting.

After a 30-minute hearing, Modou and his lawyer emerged from the courtroom. The judge ruled that the government could send him to Uganda. His lawyer had told him before his hearing that the judge would likely decide in ICE’s favor, but that didn’t alleviate the shock. “I’m scared,” he said. Modou, whom New York Focus is identifying with a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing his case, is appealing.

Modou is one of tens of thousands of immigrants across the US who are facing rendition to countries they’re not from and often have never visited. To facilitate the third-country removals, federal attorneys are petitioning courts to throw out asylum seekers’ original cases before they have a chance to argue them. The tactic allows ICE to quickly deny or abandon asylum claims, even as it struggles to follow through on the actual renditions.

In New York state, the one-two punch is widespread and disproportionately affecting African asylum seekers like Modou, according to immigration court statistics that Joseph Gunther, an independent researcher, and Brandon Morrow of the data service bklg compiled for New York Focus. Of the roughly 2,350 African asylum seekers with hearings in New York between December and February, just under 50 percent were subject to motions to abandon their cases and, in most cases, send them to a third country. For those from Latin America, that number was about 29 percent.

Of the African cases whose motions were ruled on, judges approved about 66 percent — with most granting removal to Uganda.

The cases are dismissed through a legal process known as a “pretermission.” The technique was rarely employed before last year, when the Department of Justice, which runs the immigration court system, issued a policy memo that encouraged immigration judges to accept pretermission motions. In November, motions to pretermit asylum cases skyrocketed.

In the motions, ICE attorneys point to agreements the Trump administration has signed with other countries to take asylum seekers the US wants to deport. Since those third countries state they can safely accept the migrants, the government lawyers argue, asylum seekers’ claims that they face harm if returned to their home countries are moot. Aside from Uganda for Africans, the Trump administration has signed the agreements with Honduras, Guatemala, and Ecuador, where it is seeking to send Latin Americans.

ICE has sent roughly 50 third-country nationals to Guatemala, 140 to Honduras, and an undisclosed number to Ecuador, but it hasn’t yet sent any non-Ugandans to Uganda. That’s due in part to the fact that Uganda has not released an implementation plan outlining how it would provide safe conditions and paths to asylum for the deportees from the US.

The future of the practice remains unclear: Last week an ICE memo reportedly instructed attorneys to pause the tactic, though it didn’t say for how long.

The practice is also being challenged in federal court. The lawsuit, originally filed against the first Trump administration, claims that the countries with which the US has entered into the agreements don’t qualify as safe places to seek asylum. In the case of Uganda, the plaintiffs point out that the US’s own State Department describes extrajudicial killings and torture of dissidents and death penalties and imprisonment for homosexuality in Uganda.

Some Ugandan officials have also pushed back against the arrangement. The day before the agreement was officially announced in August, the Ugandan minister of state for foreign affairs told Reuters that the country does “not have the facilities and infrastructure to accommodate” the asylees. Uganda already hosts nearly 2 million refugees — more than any other African country. After funding shortfalls left it unable to feed them, the country closed its borders to new refugees from multiple neighboring countries late last year.

Despite the lack of follow-through thus far, African asylum seekers remain terrified of the potential choice between deportation to a country they fled and rendition to a country they know little about. West Africans are trying to make sense of why a judge told them that they’d be sent to Uganda when the government hasn’t sent anyone there yet.

“Nobody understands,” Modou said. “Everyone is just talking about Uganda, Uganda, Uganda.”

For immigration attorneys, pretermission cases are exceptionally difficult to prepare. A strong asylum claim usually requires evidence that one has already suffered persecution at the hands of specific people. That’s nearly impossible for someone who has never been to the country where they fear persecution, even if their fear is well-founded.

Pretermission cases also face an accelerated timeline. ICE attorneys are filing their motions with almost no lead-time before a hearing, blowing past deadlines set by judges, said Melanie Zamenhof, senior attorney at Neighbors Link Community Law Practice.

“Sometimes it is the morning of, one hour before, or literally an oral motion made at that moment,” Zamenhof said.

That often leaves attorneys just days or even hours to respond to a pretermission motion and argue that an entirely new country is unsafe for their clients. For standard asylum cases, most clients work with their attorneys for at least a year to prepare material.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

For their part, judges move quickly on scheduling and deciding pretermission cases. Half of the African cases that received a pretermission motion between November 2025 and January 2026 were decided by January 31, according to Gunther and Morrow’s analysis. Nearly nine in 10 of those cases received a ruling in under 30 days, and one in 10 was decided on the same day the motion was filed.

For Modou’s case, his attorney, Stefi Bastiaensz, filed over 200 pages of affidavits, reports, and articles on Uganda to argue that the country can’t offer Modou safety — all in about three weeks.

Zamenhof said that some of the strongest cases she’s handled in her career are getting pretermitted. “For folks who did everything the right way, at any time prior to a hearing, the judge can just put their case in the trash,” she said. She described burnout and turnover among her colleagues as they buckle under the weight of the increased workload.

Zamenhof is currently representing a family of five from West Africa. The father, Alpha, whom New York Focus is also identifying with a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing his case, came to the US with his pregnant wife and two of their children. He left his career as a surgeon after he and his family received threats and were attacked because of their ethnicity and his opposition to the government, he said. He has been trying for two and a half years to transfer his certifications and begin practicing medicine again. He often works multiple jobs, including one as an assistant manager at a Dollar Tree.