Judge Orders Return of Honduran Man the U.S. Deported to Central African Republic

A federal judge in Colorado has ordered the Trump administration to bring a Honduran man back from the Central African Republic, ruling that immigration officers unlawfully deported him to a country where he has no family, no history and does not speak the language. The order, issued by U.S. District Judge Regina M. Rodriguez, requires the government to fly Brayan Omar Sanchez Servellon back to Colorado, release him immediately without bond conditions and stop trying to detain him again unless it can prove at a hearing that he is a danger or a flight risk.

Sanchez Servellon had lived in the United States since 2016. In 2020, an immigration judge ordered him removed to Honduras but simultaneously granted him protection under the Convention Against Torture, a finding that he would likely face torture if sent back to his home country. That protection did not stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement from detaining him in May and, in August, putting him on a flight to a country nearly 7,000 miles away with which he has no connection at all.

What the court ordered

Sanchez Servellon's lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado in June, arguing that his removal to a third country violated his due process rights and the torture-protection order already on his record. After weeks of filings, Judge Rodriguez directed the government on September 9 to produce the paperwork that supposedly justified sending him to the Central African Republic. Nine days later, according to the case file, she ruled for him outright: his transfer motion was granted, his habeas petition was granted, and the government was ordered to fly him back, release him on his own recognizance "without onerous conditions," including no GPS monitoring and no mandatory reporting, and to hand him his belongings and travel documents. The order also enjoins the government from re-detaining him without first proving at a hearing, with a lawyer present, that he poses a genuine risk. Federal officials must certify their compliance with the order by September 25.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to reporters seeking comment on the ruling.

The numbers behind the case

Sanchez Servellon's case is one small piece of a much larger program. Since January 2025, the administration has struck deportation agreements with more than three dozen countries, using authority to remove people to places other than their country of origin when that home country will not accept them or when the migrant has protection against being sent there. According to a tracker maintained by Human Rights First and Refugees International, the government forcibly transferred more than 23,000 people to 26 third countries between January 2025 and mid-August 2026, with nearly 20,000 sent to Mexico and the rest scattered across Latin America, the Caribbean and, increasingly, Africa. The first deportation flights to the Central African Republic left the United States between June and mid-August of this year, part of a wave that also included first-time removals to Belize and Dominica. The U.S. Embassy's own travel guidance warns American citizens against any travel to the Central African Republic, citing armed conflict, crime, kidnapping, landmines and disease.

How the policy took shape

Third-country removals are not new, but the scale expanded sharply after the administration created an internal office to negotiate transfer agreements and began paying some receiving governments to accept deportees. The practice has drawn repeated legal challenges. A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled in February that the government's rapid third-country removal process was unconstitutional because it gave migrants no meaningful chance to raise fears of persecution or torture before being put on a plane, and a federal appeals court in Boston largely upheld that finding earlier this month. Sanchez Servellon was deported in August, in the gap between those two rulings, and his lawyers argued in the Colorado case that his own torture-protection order was ignored altogether rather than merely narrowed to a different country.

Court records in Colorado show Sanchez Servellon's petition was not an isolated one. Federal judges in the state have granted at least half a dozen similar habeas petitions since midsummer, ordering the release of immigrants detained by ICE after finding legal defects in how they were held, and in several of those cases barring the government from removing the petitioner from the district while the case was pending.

Who is affected

Advocacy groups say Sanchez Servellon's experience mirrors that of thousands of others swept up in the expanded third-country program, many of whom held some form of protection against removal to their home countries and were nonetheless sent somewhere else with little notice. People deported under these agreements have described being held in detention on arrival, separated from family members and, in some cases, returned again from the third country to the nation they originally fled. Immigration attorneys in Colorado say ICE has increasingly stopped disclosing where detainees are being sent, making it harder for lawyers and relatives to locate people once they leave the country, let alone to challenge a removal before it happens.

Reaction

Congressional Democrats have pressed for investigations into the broader program for months. In an April letter to federal inspectors general, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and more than two dozen colleagues asked watchdogs at the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to examine the program's legality and cost.

"The Trump Administration has, with little or no notice, secretly deported individuals to countries they are not from, have no connection to, and sometimes have never heard of," the lawmakers wrote.

Refugees International, which co-publishes the deportation tracker with Human Rights First, has framed the expanding web of agreements as an effort by the administration to sidestep asylum protections by moving people through third countries with weaker safeguards. Neither DHS nor the State Department has publicly detailed how it verifies that receiving governments will not mistreat deportees or send them onward to the countries they originally fled, a gap that ABC News reported has drawn scrutiny from immigration lawyers tracking the case. Sanchez Servellon has told reporters, through his attorneys, that conditions in the Central African Republic were dangerous and that he could not communicate because he does not speak the local languages, according to Newsweek's account of the case.

What happens next

The government's September 25 deadline to certify compliance with Judge Rodriguez's order will be the first test of whether Sanchez Servellon is actually returned on the timeline the court set, and whether he is released without the conditions the judge explicitly barred. Because the order also blocks his re-detention absent a bond hearing with counsel present, any attempt by ICE to take him back into custody would likely trigger fast follow-up litigation. More broadly, the case adds to a growing body of district court rulings across the country narrowing or blocking pieces of the third-country removal program even as the administration continues signing new transfer agreements and flying deportees to newly added destination countries. With Congress divided and the program's inspector general inquiries still pending, the courts remain the primary venue where individual deportees like Sanchez Servellon are winning relief, one habeas petition at a time, while the broader legal fight over the policy continues to move through the appellate courts.