The Congo Refused to Accept a Seriously Sick Immigrant. The U.S. Deported Her There Anyway.

A woman from Colombia, fleeing a life of extreme physical abuse from her former partner, legally arrived in the U.S. in 2024 seeking asylum. In her home country, Adriana María Quiroz Zapata had endured regular rape and beatings from a man “tied to the Colombian national police” who attacked her “with impunity” thanks to his connections. In the United States, an immigration judge considered evidence and her testimony, and ruled that the U.S. could not send her back to Colombia because of the likelihood that she would be tortured or killed there. And so the U.S., despite the pending asylum case of Quiroz Zapata, instead decided to send the woman who had come here legally to the other side of the globe, deporting her to the Democratic Republic of Congo despite that country refusing to take her, on the grounds that the DRC could not provide for her serious medical needs. The U.S. deported her anyway, effectively sending Quiroz Zapata off to her death in a foreign African land, where she has since been held within a locked hotel complex that deported immigrants are not allowed to leave.

This week another federal judge, one presumably in possession of a working human soul, took mercy on Quiroz Zapata and ordered her return to the United States. In doing so, he ruled that the government’s actions in sending her to the DRC had been “likely illegal,” and ordered the Trump administration to report back by Friday evening on what specific steps it had taken toward securing Quiroz Zapata’s return to the United States.

Another story here with a first person sent to DRC to identify themselves: Colombian torture survivor Adriana Quiroz Zapata. Appears she may have been targeted for Congo removal in retaliation for filing a complaint against an ICE agent. www.thebulwark.com/p/ice-deport…

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— Gillian Brockell (@gillianbrockell.com) 9:02 PM · Apr 29, 2026

The 55-year-old Quiroz Zapata suffers from diabetes, hyperlipidemia and hypothyroidism, according to her lawyer, Lauren O’Neal. Languishing in the African city of Kinshasa, in the aforementioned locked hotel, surrounded by other deported immigrants and without access to nutritious food and basic human amenities, her health unsurprisingly plummeted. According to The Guardian, “Black spots began to grow on Quiroz Zapata’s back and foot while she was in detention, her skin started to peel and her nails blackened.” O’Neal, her lawyer, told the paper that “she’s not doing well and does worry that she’s going to die,” which sounds almost like an understatement. Judge Richard J. Leon certainly seemed to agree, writing in the ruling that she “has been sent to a country that refused to accept her because they cannot provide sufficient medical care,” and “as a result, she faces a daily risk of medical complications, up to and including death.”

But the U.S. government, naturally, doesn’t care about the slow torture and death of some random immigrant who came to our country seeking asylum from the abuse that poor person was already suffering from in their homeland. Instead, we seem to have reserved situations like Quiroz Zapata’s case for the people in our immigration system most in need of compassion, as if the psychic trauma we inflict on these people will somehow act as a deterrent that keeps millions of others from seeking a better life in the United States.

Quiroz Zapata was a victim of what our government refers to as “third country” deportations, the results of which have been some of the most simultaneously cruel and infuriatingly wasteful policy of the second Trump administration. In third country deportations, the U.S. enters into an agreement with a country unrelated to an immigrant to accept them as a deportee, although this is essentially where any kind of regulation ends. Most of the time, the people being deported to a third country are being sent there because they have U.S. court orders preventing their deportation back to their home country because they face the threat of death or torture there–this, however, has not stopped some of the “third countries” from themselves deporting these immigrants right back to their original home anyway, potentially to their deaths. Other immigrants are simply held in prisons or detention camps in this “third country” indefinitely, or are eventually released. The entire system is as chaotic as it is filled with corruption: The U.S., for instance, paid a country like Rwanda $7.5 million to accept deportees, and then proceeded to send merely seven people there. In Eswatini, Africa’s last absolute monarchy, four other men deported from the U.S. spent nine months fighting in court just for the right to be represented by a local lawyer.

Judge Orders U.S. to Return Colombian Woman Deported to Congo www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/w…

“Congo had agreed to accept some deportees, but refused on medical grounds to accept Ms. Zapata, court records show. Ms. Zapata has diabetes, hyperlipidemia and hypothyroidism, according to her lawyer.”

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— Emma Lewis (@petchary.bsky.social) 9:59 PM · May 13, 2026

The case of Quiroz Zapata, meanwhile, can’t help but echo that of El Salvador’s Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who was wrongly deported to El Salvador in 2025 despite a judge’s order, in what the government referred to as an “administrative error.” After being ordered to return Garcia to the United States–cited by Judge Leon in Zapata’s case–the government eventually did so, but has continued to attempt to deport Garcia ever since, to an increasingly ludicrous list of third country destinations. During FBI Director Kash Patel’s unrelated congressional hearings just yesterday, in fact, as the embattled Fed pushed back on questions about his alleged problem drinking, Patel found time to refer to Garcia as a “rapist” despite the fact that Garcia has never been charged with or convicted of any crime in the United States. He’s quite a guy, that Kash Patel.

One wonders how hard the administration will kick and scream in its resulting tantrum against being ordered to return Quiroz Zapata, staunchly opposed to any kind of precedent that could force it to treat more immigrants as human beings. As for the woman herself, there are few quotes from Zapata, but the few words she has spoken in interviews speak volumes. Waiting in Kinshasa for the results of the judge’s ruling, she told NYT the following: “I’m always in my room 24/7. I am scared all the time.”

This is the kind of hell that the United States deportation engine is putting people through, with absolutely not one iota of gain to any of us. What other word is there to use, other than “evil”?