MANY FROM CAMEROON, CONGO DEPORTED DESPITE PUBLIC OUTCRY

Despite a public outcry and letters from members of Congress calling for it to be stopped, a deportation flight took off on Tuesday afternoon, carrying asylum seekers from Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo back to the countries from which they had fled.

Detainees, through their attorneys and other advocates, had raised concerns that they were going to be deported and that they believed they would be killed by their governments after they arrived. Members of Congress, including Rep. Bennie Thompson and Rep. Karen Bass, sent letters to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, asking the agency to stop the deportations. They cited a complaint made by eight men to the Department of Homeland Security Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties that said they had been forcibly coerced into signing paperwork related to their deportation.

“We urge you to halt the removal of Cameroonians until a fair, thorough, and transparent investigation into the allegations outlined in this very troubling complaint is complete,” Thompson and Bass wrote.

Protesters demonstrated outside the detention center in Texas where the asylum seekers were being held and filmed the buses that took the detainees to the airport.

But that didn’t stop the flight.

The plane left at close to 5 p.m. central time on Tuesday, according to Tom Cartwright, a volunteer with Witness at the Border, an organization that tracks Immigration and Customs Enforcement flights.

Not all of the more than 200 Cameroonians and Congolese who detainees said were transferred to a detention facility in Texas to be deported were on the flight. Some of the group remained at Prairieland Detention Center, according to Rebekah Entralgo of Freedom For

Immigrants, and a few were pulled from the flight due to individual legal actions taken on their behalf.

It remains unclear how many people were deported on the flight. News articles in Cameroon reported varying numbers of deportees — 57 and 81.

ICE told the Union-Tribune on Monday that the agency could not give information about operations, including deportations, that are not yet completed. ICE did not respond to a second request for comment about the deportation flight after it landed.

According to advocates, among those taken off of the flight were two men who were part of the eight who filed the complaint. One of them said his fingers had been broken, and the other said he’d been pepper-sprayed in the eyes. Another man who was part of the eight is also still in ICE custody, advocates said, but the other five are believed to have been deported.

A woman was taken off of the flight because she was identified as a class member in an ongoing lawsuit challenging the practice of limiting how many asylum seekers are processed at ports of entry on a given day, known as metering, as well as its intersection with a Trump administration change to asylum rules known as the third country transit ban. Asylum seekers who were metered before a certain date are not supposed to have the ban applied in their cases, according to the current ruling in the case.

Advocates are still working to determine what had happened to deportees after they touched down.