IOWA — Immigration and Customs Enforcement re-detained asylum seeker Jose Yugar-Cruz at a facility in Iowa in April 2026 to deport him to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after a federal judge ruled he could be removed there. Yugar-Cruz had been released from custody three months earlier after a federal court found his prior 17-month detention unlawful.

Yugar-Cruz arrived at the Arizona-Mexico border in July 2023, turned himself in to ICE and requested asylum. After his asylum claim was denied, a federal judge granted him a withholding of removal order in January 2025, finding it more likely than not that he would face torture or persecution if returned to his home country in South America. A withholding of removal order does not create a pathway to legal residence in the United States and allows for third-country deportations.

Since the start of 2025, ICE attempted unsuccessfully to remove Yugar-Cruz to Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Mexico and Canada, according to court records. After receiving notice in April 2026 that the Democratic Republic of the Congo would accept him, ICE detained him again. He was listed on the manifest for the first deportation flight to that country in mid-April, but his federal court case delayed his removal.

"I feel truly, truly devastated by what is happening to me," Yugar-Cruz said from ICE detention in Iowa. "I lost my mother while detained. I can't help my children. I feel like a person who has no value."

He said ICE agents had not given him a date for departure. "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," he said. "I keep thinking it's a nightmare that I will wake up from."

Attorney Alison Griffith said her team asked ICE to send Yugar-Cruz to a Spanish-speaking country closer to his home instead of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but ICE refused. According to court records, ICE said the Congo provided diplomatic assurances that deportees sent there would not be persecuted or tortured. The country is one of 28 that accept third-country deportees.

A federal judge described the Supreme Court's June 2025 ruling lifting a stay on third-country removals as "all but fatal to Yugar-Cruz's claim," leaving him with "little choice but to deny" the motion to release him. A lower court had placed the stay while litigation over DHS's third-country removal practices was pending; in February 2026, a district court ruled those practices unlawful, but that ruling was stayed pending appeal, allowing deportations to continue.

"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, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. The institute estimates the Department of Homeland Security deported about 15,000 people to third countries between January 20 and December 31, 2025, of which 13,000 were sent to Mexico.