Kinshasa, DR Congo - US Immigration and Customs Enforcement abducted more than a dozen Latin American migrants, imprisoned and shackled them, then deported them to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
"I'm on the other side of the world," Hugo Palencia told the New York Times from a hotel in the DRC.
"We’re all wondering whether we're more afraid to return to our countries, or to be here in a country like this," he continued.
"I know nothing of Congo, except the music, which Colombian musicians sometimes cover, translated into Spanish... This country is three times as insecure and dangerous as my native country."
Palencia is one of 15 Central American refugees who the Trump administration has shipped off to the DRC. It would be unsafe for him to return to Colombia.
The NYT interviewed a number of these migrants at a detention hotel they were sent to when they arrived in Kinshasa.
They had been presented with a choice: Go back to their home country, or go to a war-ravaged central African nation.
President Donald Trump has overseen an extensive third-country deportation policy, sending thousands of people to countries with which they have no connection. In many cases, they cannot even speak the language there.
The detainees are prisoners within the hotel walls, surrounded by barbed wire fences and Congolese soldiers.
On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered that one of them be returned to the US due to medical concerns.
A woman from Colombia said that she couldn't go back home due to the risk of being kidnapped and tortured by an armed group.
"Where on earth is this place?" she'd asked when she found out she was going to the DRC.
"I said, 'I'm scared to go there. I don't want to be sent to Africa. You can't do this to me. What you're doing isn't legal.'"