When Jose Yugar-Cruz arrived at the Arizona-Mexico border in the July heat nearly two years ago, he told a federal court, he immediately turned himself into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and asked for asylum. 

In January 2025, though he was denied asylum, he became one of about 4,000 migrants last year to be granted a court order preventing their deportation to their home country because a judge found it more likely than not that they would face torture or persecution if returned, immigration court data shows.

But the supposed victory was followed by a yearlong legal battle during which he remained detained. On Monday, a federal judge cleared the way for ICE to deport Yugar-Cruz to the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

"I feel truly, truly devastated by what is happening to me," Yugar-Cruz, 37, told CBS News from ICE detention in Iowa, speaking in Spanish. "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."

"I keep thinking it's a nightmare that I will wake up from," he added. Yugar-Cruz spoke in a joint interview with CBS News and The Minnesota Star Tribune.

A withholding of removal order like the one Yugar-Cruz received doesn't create a pathway to legal residence in the United States and allows for third-country deportations. But under previous administrations, the difficulty of deporting migrants to countries they aren't from meant that most who were granted such protections would end up staying in the U.S. indefinitely, immigration policy experts told CBS News. 

"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, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. 

Starting last February, the Trump administration began a coordinated push to sign agreements with countries around the world to accept third-country deportees while seeking to arrest and remove those granted withholding of removal orders. 

"We are working with other countries to say, 'We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries. Will you do that as a favor to us?'" Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during a Cabinet meeting after President Trump's first 100 days back in office. "And the further away from America the better, so they can't come back across the border."

Deportees — with and without criminal records — have been sent to countries including Ghana, Cameroon, South Sudan and El Salvador. Many were ultimately sent back to their home countries, according to court records and a congressional report, despite U.S. judges' rulings in cases like Yugar-Cruz's affirming they would likely face torture or persecution there. 

ICE did not respond to a request for comment on Yugar-Cruz's case or its third-country removal practices. Court records show that ICE said the DRC "provided diplomatic assurances" that deportees sent there would not be persecuted or tortured. 

Congo is one of the latest of 28 countries to accept third-country deportees. The administration is also considering a plan to resettle 1,000 Afghan evacuees living in Qatar who fought alongside U.S. troops to the DRC, The New York Times first reported. The Qatar-based camp was initially intended as an expedited processing hub to grant eligible refugees permanent legal status in the U.S.

On April 17, a group of 15 South American deportees arrived in the DRC, according to a government announcement from the country. The announcement, written in French, said the arrangement is "strictly transitory, temporary, and limited in time." 

This is a common feature of third-country deportation agreements, said Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, one of the groups monitoring third-country deportations. 

"They're sold to other countries as temporary," she told CBS News of the agreements. "The vast majority of these folks are going to leave, or be repatriated."

The South American deportees told NPR that they were given no viable options other than to return to their home country. At least one, a woman from Colombia, has been granted legal protections from deportation, Reuters reported. 

"That is where the fundamental problem comes," Schacher said. "It's sort of an end run around those protections."

Yugar-Cruz, who asked that his native country be withheld to protect him, fled from South America. Since the start of 2025, ICE tried unsuccessfully to remove him to Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Mexico and Canada, according to court records. 

Earlier this year, Yugar-Cruz was released from ICE detention for three months after a federal court ruled his detention, which had spanned 17 months, was unlawful, court records show. But in April, after ICE received notice that the DRC would accept Yugar-Cruz, he was detained again.

"I was starting to live in freedom, but they detained me again," he said. "I lost my mother while detained. I can't help my children. I'm here detained. I feel like a person who has no value."

Yugar-Cruz was originally on the manifest for the first deportation flight to the DRC that took place in mid-April, according to court records, but his ongoing federal court case delayed his removal. 

Third-country deportations made up a small fraction of those deported last year. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that the Department of Homeland Security deported about 15,000 people to third countries between Jan. 20 and Dec. 31, 2025, of which 13,000 were sent to Mexico. DHS said in early December it had deported a total of more than 605,000 people since Mr. Trump returned to office. 

Ruiz Soto said the tactic is intended to deter migrants, both in the U.S. and those who may be considering entering illegally.  

"Even small numbers of people being sent to other countries in chains, that made it much more visible than in the past for people to be essentially scared into saying 'this could be me, this could happen to me,'" he said. 

DHS is currently facing a class-action lawsuit from those granted withholding of removal, arguing that before being removed to a third country, immigrants should be given an opportunity to raise concerns of being persecuted or tortured in that country. While a lower court placed a stay on removals while the litigation was pending, the Supreme Court lifted the stay in June 2025.

In February of this year, a district court ruled that DHS's third-country removal practices were unlawful, but the ruling was stayed pending the government's appeal, allowing the deportations to continue. 

The federal judge in Yugar-Cruz's case cited the Supreme Court's ruling in his decision, describing it as "all but fatal to Yugar-Cruz's claim," leaving him with "little choice but to deny" the motion to release him from detention.

Yugar-Cruz's deportation could take place any day now, but ICE agents have not given him a date for his departure, he said. Alison Griffith, his attorney, said her team asked that ICE consider sending him to a Spanish-speaking country closer to home instead of the DRC, but she said they refused.   

"I still have faith that maybe some miracle could happen in my case and that they would give me my freedom again," Yugar-Cruz said. 

"I am grateful to all those people who helped me," he added, referring to the Iowa-based advocates who rallied around him during the months he was released. "It is as if they filled that empty space that my mother left in me — those people filled it."