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For the first few hours of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight over the Atlantic Ocean, Mohamed Barry continued to act like himself, which is to say, he expected to be visible to the people around him.
So as GEO Group flight security guards stood over him and the other shackled passengers, chatting casually with each other, he asked them what country he was going to be deported to. They didn’t answer.
When the guards started drinking from red and blue plastic cups and the smell of alcohol wafted over to his seat, he asked one of them point-blank, “Are you guys allowed to drink on the job?” No response.
Then a man from Eritrea or Somalia, Barry isn’t sure which, began to beg the guards to let him use the lavatory. Barry chimed in with an appeal to decency, telling the guards, “Please consider us as human beings.” But the guards were boisterous by that point, he said, and they didn’t appreciate the man’s increasingly loud and desperate pleas crashing their party.
Barry watched as a guard turned and looked at the man dead in the face and said, “You. Can pee on. You.” Another guard laughed.
“After seeing that, I just kept my head down,” Barry, 52, told me over the phone last week.
Barry was among an estimated 71 people expelled to countries where they had no ties on a July 31 Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight—more than any other known third-country removal flight to Africa. On the 26-hour flight, which made stops in Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, and Ghana, Barry and other passengers say ICE-contracted guards subjected them to verbal and physical abuse, tied at least two of them in full-body straitjackets, and refused to let them use the lavatory. Barry also said he witnessed an ICE agent tell a foreign official to return them to their countries of origin, despite all having protection orders barring this—a practice called chain refoulement that is illegal under U.S. and international law.
ICE and GEO Group did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the allegations in this story. A Department of Homeland Security representative who did not identify themselves also did not answer the questions but replied with an unrelated line they’ve sent for two other recent stories: “For operational security purposes, we would never confirm the location of an airplane.”
A native of Guinea who had been in the United States for 25 years and has five U.S. citizen children, Barry is now in hiding in another West African country, with no ID and a waning supply of his heart medication.
“To be honest, my life is completely upside down,” he said. “I think what America did to me is wrong.”
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