Two American military cargo jets deported people to Africa this month on flights that appear to have had their transponders turned off, obscuring their locations from public flight databases and other nearby aircraft.
One of the jets was later identified in a lawsuit in U.S. federal court as carrying 14 Nigerian and Gambian nationals to a prison camp in Ghana. They have since been returned to their countries of origin, Ghana said, despite all having credible fears of persecution or torture. The other jet secretly landed in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Mali, according to communications from the flight deck obtained by Rolling Stone. Representatives for the governments of these countries did not respond to emails asking if this jet also included third-country nationals.
The secret flights are part of what appears to be a surge in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity across the African continent, following a pressure campaign led by President Donald Trump on many of the governments there over the summer.
“The administration is using military secrecy to cover for what is basically a law enforcement/immigration enforcement function,” an activist flight tracker who goes by JJ in DC told Rolling Stone. “If this is being done in our interest, we have a right to know where these deportation flights are going.”
While it is legal for military aircraft to turn off their transponders, this is generally reserved for combat and surveillance missions, JJ in DC, who is a military veteran, said. Military flights also cost much more to operate than charter carriers, as much as $28,500 an hour, according to Reuters.
The Air Force and ICE did not respond to requests for comment. Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not provide a statement prior to publication. This story will be updated if any of them do.
Both secret trips were on Air Force C-17 Globemasters. The first one left McChord Field near Tacoma, Wash., on the evening of Sept. 4, stopping at the ICE-detention hub city of Alexandria, La., and the U.S. military outpost at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — which Trump has converted into an ICE facility holding what he has baselessly claimed are “the worst of the worst” deportees. The flight landed in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a likely fuel stop, the next afternoon.
These flights were conducted without the standard transponder signal, called Automatic Dependent Signal-Broadcast, or ADS-B, which transmits constant information about a flight, including registration, location, speed, and altitude, to any receiver within range. The C-17 used an alternative signal transmitting its registration but no location or other flight data — though flight-tracking websites could still approximate its location through a kind of triangulation.
It is unclear when exactly the C-17 left St. Croix, because by then it was using another type of signal even harder to detect, in which an aircraft transmits its location via data link only when requested by a specific partner, like an air base. Different flight-tracking websites were able to capture different fragments of the C-17’s trajectory — a single blip over the Atlantic Ocean on the night of Sept. 5 and part of a descent toward Accra, Ghana’s capital, the next morning.
Hours later, a brief signal showed it landing in Cape Verde, probably for crew rest, before returning home. Its ADS-B transponder began transmitting again on Sept 10. Two days later, a lawsuit filed in a U.S. District Court alleged the flight held 14 men — 13 from Nigeria and one from The Gambia — who had all been granted protections from removal to their countries of origin for fear of persecution or torture. They were loaded onto the cargo jet in the middle of the night with no advance warning, they alleged, and were only told where they were going when the plane was in the air. One Nigerian man said that after he asked to speak to his lawyers, he was “straitjacketed for several hours” — seeming to refer to the WRAP device ICE uses on immigrants who resist transport, which has been the subject of a number of lawsuits over the years alleging use of the device has caused permanent injury and even death by asphyxiation.
Once in Ghana, the men said they were sent to an “abysmal” open-air prison camp and told they would be returned to their countries of origin — something the U.S. government had been barred from doing. Though Judge Tanya Chutkan called the Trump administration’s actions “disingenuous,” she ultimately ruled she did not have the jurisdiction to stop it. On Tuesday, Ghana said all of the men had been returned to their home countries, though attorneys told the Associated Press four were still in the Ghana prison.
Human rights groups say this amounts to chain refoulement — the forcible expulsion of refugees and asylum seekers to countries where they are vulnerable to return to countries where they face persecution — and violates both domestic and international law.
“What is alarming today is the emerging pattern of shadowy deportations of people who have not had access to a court or any meaningful form of due process — removals that bear the hallmarks of forced disappearances under international law,” says Rebecca Sharpless, a University of Miami law professor who studies ICE flights.
Accepting third-country nationals “should not be misconstrued as an endorsement of the immigration policies of the Trump administration,” Ghanaian foreign minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa said Monday. “Our decision is grounded purely on humanitarian principle and Pan-African empathy.”
The second C-17 trip began like the first one — Alexandria, Gitmo, St. Croix, no ADS-B transponder but still trackable — before becoming even harder to detect when it left St. Croix. One flight-tracking website captured a few blips as it headed toward the western coast of Africa in the small hours of Sept. 10, and two blips over Senegal later that evening. The other flight-tracking website didn’t capture anything at all, which one activist described as “very weird.”
Two of the flight deck transmissions Rolling Stone obtained, which are not available on flight-tracking websites, show the pilots planning to land at Roberts International Airport in Monrovia, Liberia, and Freetown International Airport in Sierra Leone that morning, with a third transmission showing an intended stop in Mali’s capital of Bamako in the early afternoon. The final stop in Senegal was likely for crew rest.
Two other military aircraft are known to have done ICE missions without broadcasting transponder signals: the jets that carried third-country nationals from a U.S. base in Djibouti to South Sudan and Eswatini in July.
That same month, Trump held a bizarre “Africa summit” at the White House, gathering five of the continent’s 50-plus leaders around a conference table, where he extolled their “very valuable land, great minerals, great oil deposits, and wonderful people” and fished for compliments from his fellow heads of state. (“A tremendous golfer.” “Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”) And, Trump said, they were making progress on third-country agreements.
Since then, ICE flights to Africa are surging. A new ICE charter, Paradigm Jet Management, has entered the picture, running at least eight deportation trips to and from the continent in the last six weeks. ICE also sent seven third-country nationals to Rwanda on two Gulfstream jets, and now the Trump administration is threatening to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda and Mahmoud Khalil to Algeria (or Syria). Omni Air International carried Russian dissidents to Egypt, where they were forced onto a plane to Moscow, and last week flew an eight-stop deportation mega-route from Senegal to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where passengers on the last stop likely spent more than 50 hours shackled in handcuffs and leg irons attached to chains around their waists.
And there have been at least five ICE missions to Africa on military jets, though if the last two are any indication, they are getting increasingly harder to spot.
