Jamila Osman is right to sound the alarm in her recent ZNetwork article, “End of Protected Status Puts Thousands of Somali Immigrants at Immediate Risk”. Somalis have good reason to feel particularly exposed. Donald Trump has repeatedly singled them out, often through his fixation on Representative Ilhan Omar, who is Somali born, Muslim, Black, a former refugee and one of his most visible political critics. Trump has gone so far as to say that Omar and Representative Rashida Tlaib should be sent “back where they came from,” although both are American citizens. Reuters reported those remarks in February.

But Somalia is only part of the story. Haitians have been affected on a much larger numerical scale, while Cameroonians, Ethiopians and South Sudanese have also faced the loss or threatened loss of protection. Pew Research Center calculated that the administration had moved to end Temporary Protected Status for more than one million people. Its August figures included about 334,900 Haitians, 5,000 Cameroonians, 5,000 Ethiopians, 1,100 Somalis and 230 South Sudanese, although litigation was still affecting the Ethiopian and Somali terminations at the time of Pew’s count. Somalis may attract more attention because Trump talks about them so often, but visibility should not be confused with exclusivity.

What troubles me is the larger pattern. Some immigrants are treated as people whose fears deserve to be heard, while others are talked about as burdens, criminals or people America should simply get rid of. Race is not the only thing at work, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to pretend that race has nothing to do with it.

Trump’s attitude toward Africa did not begin with Somalia. In 2018, during a discussion about immigration, he reportedly asked why the United States should accept people from Haiti and African “shithole countries” while suggesting that more immigrants should come from Norway. At the time, the remark was treated as another Trump outrage and eventually buried under the next one. Looking at immigration policy now, the old comparison deserves another look because it raised a question that never really disappeared: which immigrants are considered desirable?

There have been other revealing moments. In 2017 Trump repeatedly referred to Namibia as “Nambia.” At the same gathering with African leaders, he spoke about Africa’s business potential and said that he had friends going to their countries “trying to get rich.” Africa appeared in that telling less as a collection of societies with their own histories and interests than as a place where people he knew could make money.

More recently, Trump mocked aid to Lesotho by calling it a country “nobody has ever heard of.”  Lesotho’s government understandably objected, while the episode contained another irony: Elon Musk’s Starlink was itself pursuing business in the supposedly unknown country. PBS examined that contradiction.

Then there was Trump’s exchange with Liberian President Joseph Boakai. After Boakai spoke at the White House, Trump praised his English and asked where he had learned to speak it so well. English is Liberia’s official language, as Reuters pointed out. Liberia’s history is also deeply intertwined with that of the United States. The modern republic developed through the settlement of formerly enslaved and free Black people from America, and Monrovia itself is named after an American president. Whether Trump knew any of this, I have no idea. What struck me was his apparent surprise that an African president could speak such polished English.

There was some irony in the exchange. Boakai’s English was careful and precise, while Trump’s own spontaneous speech is often repetitive and fragmented. Boakai did not seem to require Trump’s linguistic approval.

When I taught African politics, I sometimes gave students a blank map of Africa at the beginning of the course. Many did badly at first, which did not bother me. They were there to learn, and by the end I made sure even students who had struggled could identify most of the continent. I sometimes wonder how much of that same map Trump could fill in.

I do not say this because knowing where Lesotho or Namibia lies automatically makes someone respectful of Africans. It does not. But knowing Africa as something more than a collection of “shithole countries” might make it harder to dismiss Africans themselves so casually. Knowledge does not guarantee respect, but ignorance can make contempt much easier.

Africa is represented in the African Union by 55 member states. That count includes the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in Western Sahara, whose sovereignty remains disputed and much of whose territory is controlled by Morocco. The continent contains thousands of languages and an enormous range of histories, cultures, religions and political experiences.

It is also where the human story began. The Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program places the evolution of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago and notes that all living human beings share roots extending back to Africa. Evidence from different parts of the continent suggests that our species did not emerge neatly from one isolated spot but through populations interacting across Africa over long periods. The Smithsonian discusses that broader African origin here. Long before there was a Norway to contrast favorably with supposedly undesirable African countries, our common ancestors were African.

The point is not whether Trump could pass my old geography exercise. The point is what happens when ignorance and contempt are backed by the power of the presidency. What sounded like ugly rhetoric years ago now looks much closer to actual policy.

There is also an irony much closer to Trump himself. His wife, Melania, is an immigrant. The White House biography says she was born in Slovenia, moved to New York in 1996 and became an American citizen in 2006. Immigration is therefore part of Trump’s own family story. Melania herself is not the issue, and there is no reason to make her one. But of course she is not Haitian, Somali or African.

That brings us back to the Norway comparison. Perhaps the issue was never simply immigration. It was also about which immigrants were considered desirable.

The contrast becomes much harder to ignore when we look at South Africa. Elon Musk, who grew up there and now controls one of the world’s most influential communications platforms, has repeatedly promoted claims that white South Africans face systematic racial persecution. Claims of a “white genocide” that once circulated largely on the political margins gained a much larger international audience and found a receptive listener in Trump.

The Trump administration eventually turned the concern into policy. A 2025 White House order accused South Africa of race based discrimination against Afrikaners and directed the United States to prioritize their resettlement. Trump later turned his Oval Office meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa into an extraordinary spectacle centered on claims about the persecution of white South Africans.

None of this means Afrikaners cannot experience discrimination, violent crime or genuine persecution. Of course they can. If an individual Afrikaner has a genuine claim to refugee protection, that person deserves exactly the same serious consideration as anyone else. Refugee protection should not depend on whether I approve of the history or politics of the group seeking it.

That is exactly why the numbers are so disturbing. Pew Research Center found that the United States admitted 10,258 refugees during the first ten months of fiscal year 2026. Of those, 10,255 were South Africans and only three were from the rest of the world, all from Afghanistan. Before this period, South Africans had never been a major source of refugees admitted to the United States.

Think about that beside Sudan, one of the worst displacement catastrophes in the world, or Haiti, or the many people fleeing repression and war elsewhere in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Virtually everyone admitted through the American refugee program during that period came from South Africa. Refugees International described the administration’s approach as the “racialization” of the US refugee admissions program and argued that humanitarian danger, rather than race or cultural preference, is supposed to guide refugee resettlement.

There is another irony. Even as Trump portrays white South Africans as people in need of refuge abroad, Reuters has reported on white South Africans returning home, with people citing family, lower costs and quality of life among their reasons. That does not tell us whether any particular Afrikaner has a valid refugee claim, and it should not be used to dismiss one. It does make the larger contrast harder to ignore.

The question is not whether Afrikaners deserve human rights. They do. The question is why those rights seem so much easier to recognize when the Africans asking for them are white.

There is another side to this story that concerns me just as much. What happens to the people the United States does not want? Increasingly, some are not being sent home at all. They are being sent somewhere else.

The Trump administration has greatly expanded what are called third country removals, sending people to countries where they are not citizens and may never have lived. Refugees International and Human Rights First reported on August 18 that between January 2025 and August 15, 2026, the United States had forcibly transferred more than 23,000 people to 26 third countries. More than 330 had been transferred to African countries, and some had already received protection in the United States against being returned to countries where they could face persecution or torture.

The practice has been accelerating. CBS News reported on August 30 that over a period of only ten days, the Trump administration sent more than one hundred deportees from Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua and other countries to Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. These people were not citizens of the African countries receiving them.

This is not an occasional anomaly. Amnesty International describes third country removal as sending people to countries they may never have visited, where they have no personal connections and may not speak the language. Amnesty found that the United States had arrangements with at least twelve African states by June: Cabo Verde, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ghana, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Uganda.

By August, Amnesty was openly urging African governments to refuse complicity in these transfers. It pointed to people from Turkey, Afghanistan and Iran being sent to the Central African Republic, a country where they had no ties and whose language they did not speak. Almost all of that particular group had already been protected by the United States from removal to their own countries.

The absurdity of the arrangement becomes clearer when we look at individual people. A Venezuelan who had lived in Texas for years and had a wife and infant American son was deported to Liberia. He reportedly learned only shortly before departure that this was where the United States was sending him. Latin Americans have likewise been sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Afghans and others have been transferred to the Central African Republic.

This changes Africa’s place in the migration story. For years we have watched Africans cross borders, travel through the Sahara, become trapped in Libya and risk their lives on the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. Now parts of Africa are also becoming destinations for people rejected by the United States who are not African at all. Africa is in danger of becoming a dumping ground for people powerful countries do not want.

African governments cannot escape responsibility for this. It would be too simple to describe them all as helpless victims of Washington. The imbalance of power is real, but these governments also make choices. Some see money, security cooperation, diplomatic favor or other benefits in accepting people who have no meaningful connection to their countries. The case of Eswatini shows how concrete these bargains can become: Reuters reported that its agreement with Washington was worth $5.1 million.

Calling this sovereignty does not settle the moral question. A government may have the sovereign authority to sign an agreement, but sovereignty does not tell us whether the decision is humane or whom it actually serves. Some authoritarian rulers who have done little to protect their own citizens can now gain money, diplomatic favor or political advantage by accepting people rejected by wealthier countries. There is something particularly shameful about African governments benefiting from the targeting of other vulnerable people, including other Africans.

The United States did not invent this impulse. Australia used offshore processing in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Britain tried to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. European governments have increasingly debated arrangements to move people beyond their own borders. These programs differ legally and politically, and they should not be lazily treated as identical. The common temptation, however, is easy to see: wealthy countries want to decide who gets through the door while moving responsibility for many of the people they reject somewhere else.

There is money all along this road. I have written before about refugee agency and resilience because refugees should not be reduced to helpless people waiting for somebody else to rescue them. They make decisions, improvise, organize, resist, endure and rebuild their lives under conditions most of us would find unbearable. But agency does not eliminate vulnerability, and vulnerability can be profitable to other people. Governments can turn refugees into bargaining chips. Politicians can use them to mobilize voters. Businesses can make money detaining and transporting them. Criminal networks can profit from moving them across borders, kidnapping them or demanding ransom from their families. Traffickers do not create all the conditions that make people vulnerable. They monetize them.

The harder governments make legal movement, the more room they leave for middlemen. Someone leaving Eritrea, Sudan or Somalia may pay one person to cross a border, another to cross the Sahara, someone else to enter Libya and finally another for a place on a boat. Money changes hands repeatedly while the migrant becomes poorer and more vulnerable. The migrant moves down the chain while money moves up it.

I encountered an especially horrifying version of this more than a decade ago when I wrote “Human Trafficking in Sinai” for Think Africa Press in 2013. The article was subsequently archived and circulated through UNHCR’s refugee information system and later cited in research on Mediterranean smuggling and trafficking. Eritrean and other African refugees were being kidnapped, transported through Sudan into Egypt, held in torture camps in Sinai and subjected to horrific violence while traffickers demanded ransom from relatives abroad. In some cases relatives were forced to listen over the telephone while captives were tortured.

Another allegation emerging from Sinai was even more disturbing: that some captives were being exploited for their organs. Those claims have to be handled carefully because not every report of organ harvesting from the Sinai camps was independently established. But the wider organ trade involving African refugees in Egypt was very real. The Coalition for Organ-Failure Solutions documented 57 Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers who reported being victims of organ trafficking in Egypt. Every documented case involved the removal of a kidney. Medical examinations arranged for several victims confirmed that kidneys had been removed, while some victims possessed records from hospitals connected to their operations.

This raises a question that tends to disappear when organ trafficking is described simply as the work of criminals. A kidney intended for transplantation cannot simply be cut out by a trafficker in the desert and handed to a customer. It has to be tested, matched, removed surgically and transplanted into another human being. That requires laboratories, medical equipment, medical facilities and people with considerable medical expertise.

Research published in the British Journal of Criminology shows how deeply Egypt’s illicit kidney market could intersect with legitimate medical infrastructure. Its investigation found networks connecting Sudanese migrants, brokers, tissue typing laboratories, hospitals, transplant centers and medical professionals. One broker interviewed by the researchers said that many of the buyers came from the Gulf. The same study documented a Saudi recipient and described recipients paying tens of thousands of dollars, with money distributed among hospitals, laboratories, medical personnel and intermediaries.

Earlier reporting by what was then the United Nations humanitarian news service described the same class and geographic divide. It reported that Sudanese could become organ suppliers while recipients came from the wealthier Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia. The New Humanitarian’s reporting on Egypt’s organ trade described secret arrangements involving Saudi patients willing to pay substantial sums for transplants.

This is what makes the story so morally disturbing. At one end of the chain could be an African refugee whose poverty, immigration status or desperation made him extraordinarily easy to exploit. At the other end could be a wealthy patient able to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a kidney. Between them stood brokers, laboratories, clinics and medical personnel. The poor body supplied the organ while wealth purchased access to it.

That complicates the comforting distinction between the criminal underworld and respectable society. A trafficker can kidnap a person and a broker can find a buyer, but a functioning transplant requires another kind of expertise. If an illegally obtained kidney ultimately enters another human body, somewhere along that road the criminal economy has encountered the medical profession.

I would not claim that every organ allegedly removed from a refugee in Sinai ended up in a Saudi or Gulf recipient. The evidence does not allow us to draw that line so neatly. Nor does evidence of organ trafficking justify accusing Egyptian doctors as a class. But the documented Egyptian kidney market establishes something important: vulnerable African migrants supplied organs, wealthy domestic and international patients created demand, and functioning transplant networks involved medical institutions and professionals.

Sinai therefore exposes something larger than the cruelty of individual traffickers. Exploitation can travel upward through society. The person holding a refugee captive may be obviously criminal, while the person purchasing the kidney may be wealthy and respectable and the professional performing the procedure may wear a white coat. Vulnerability becomes profitable precisely because these apparently separate worlds can meet in the same transaction.

Libya shows another version of the same logic. Refugees and migrants have faced detention, extortion, torture, sexual violence, forced labor and slavery there. For Black Africans, enslavement in Libya has not been a metaphor. People have been forced to work, tortured for ransom and treated as commodities. Stopping a refugee before that person reaches Europe does not make the refugee disappear. It simply changes where the suffering takes place.

There is an important distinction here that should not be lost. The UN refugee agency has evacuated vulnerable asylum seekers and refugees from Libya through its Emergency Transit Mechanisms. The Rwanda mechanism established by UNHCR, Rwanda and the African Union is a voluntary humanitarian evacuation program for people facing danger in Libya. UNHCR says evacuees are temporarily hosted while their cases are processed and longer term solutions, usually third country resettlement, are sought. By April 2025, 2,760 people had been evacuated from Libya to Rwanda and more than 2,100 had subsequently been resettled elsewhere.

That is morally and legally very different from forcing an Afghan or Venezuelan onto a plane from the United States to an African country he has never seen. I do not want to blur the distinction. Still, even the humanitarian system tells us something about who waits and who decides. An Eritrean, Sudanese, Somali or Ethiopian refugee can flee home, cross several borders, survive the Sahara and Libya, be evacuated to Rwanda, and then wait while governments elsewhere decide whether to accept him. Africa becomes the waiting room while wealthy countries remain the gatekeepers.

Africans also have to look at what we do to one another. It is easy, and justified, to condemn Trump’s treatment of Africans. It is harder to confront Africans targeting other Africans. South Africa has repeatedly experienced xenophobic hostility toward migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Somalia, Nigeria and other African countries. People who escaped hardship elsewhere on the continent have discovered that being African does not guarantee solidarity from other Africans.

The politics behind this is not mysterious. It is easier to blame a Zimbabwean or Nigerian for unemployment than to explain why an economy cannot create enough jobs. It is easier to blame migrants for overcrowding or failing services than to confront inequality, corruption and years of poor policy. The foreigner becomes a convenient explanation for problems that the foreigner did not create.

The same moral standard has to apply everywhere. Racism against Africans in the United States or Europe is wrong, but Africans attacking other Africans are also wrong. An African government helping a rich country dispose of unwanted migrants does not become virtuous simply because the government is African.

My own relationship to asylum has made it difficult for me to think about these questions only as policy. Over the years I helped asylum seekers by researching and writing about political conditions in the countries they had fled. I was not formally trained as an asylum officer or immigration lawyer. Much of what I learned came from listening to people and trying to understand the places from which they came.

Years later, US Citizenship and Immigration Services selected me for a position as an asylum officer. I initially accepted, and an entrance on duty date was confirmed, but I eventually walked away. I had heard good things about the training, so that was not what troubled me. What troubled me was the responsibility I would eventually carry.

I kept imagining another human being sitting across the desk from me, trying to convince me that returning home could cost him his freedom or his life. On my side of the desk there would be an interview, a file, questions about credibility and eventually a legal decision. For the person sitting across from me, it could be everything. I was not sure I wanted that kind of power over another person.

Perhaps that is also why the bureaucratic language of immigration bothers me. Words such as “processing,” “removal,” “transfer” and “return” sound clean and orderly, even when the experience they describe is frightening or violent. Bureaucratic language can make even death sound orderly.

In 2018, the United States was deporting 34 year old Eritrean Zeresenay Ermias Testfatsion to Eritrea after more than a year in ICE custody. During transit through Cairo, while he was being held by Egyptian authorities and waiting for the final journey to Asmara, he was found dead in a shower area. ICE said it was an apparent suicide. The official announcement carried the remarkably sanitized title “ICE detainee passes away in transit to home country”.

“Passes away” is gentle language and “home country” sounds almost comforting. Put together, the words turn the death of a 34 year old man during forced removal into something resembling an unfortunate interruption in an ordinary journey. Testfatsion had spent more than a year in American immigration custody before dying during the journey back to Eritrea. I do not know what Testfatsion was thinking in his final hours, and I will not invent a story about his death. His case does not need embellishment. But it is not the only Eritrean case showing how differently a government and the person being deported can understand the word “return.”

In August 2004, Libya tried to deport 75 Eritreans to Asmara. UNHCR later reported that the Eritreans said they had been detained, physically abused, denied access to an asylum procedure and forced onto the aircraft without being told where it was going. According to their account, they discovered only after takeoff that the destination was Eritrea. The aircraft was diverted to Khartoum.

What happened afterward matters enormously. Sixty of the Eritreans sought asylum in Sudan, and Sudan granted all sixty refugee status. The people desperate enough to prevent their forced return were subsequently recognized as people entitled to international protection. UNHCR went further and described Libya’s attempt to deport them as a serious violation of its obligations under the African refugee convention and the principle against returning people to places where they may face persecution. Its account of the episode remains available here.

This is what sanitized language can hide. Terms such as “home country,” “return,” “removal” and “in transit” may sound routine to a bureaucracy, but to the person being described they can mean terror, imprisonment, separation from family or being forced onto an aircraft to a place he is desperate not to go. The person being transferred may not know where the plane is taking him. The person being removed may have a child waiting at home. The person being returned may believe that prison or something worse is waiting when the plane lands. A government document can describe a perfectly orderly administrative procedure while the human being inside that procedure is living through the most frightening experience of his life.

This is why I come back to Jamila Osman’s article agreeing with her but wanting to widen the frame. Somalis should resist the loss of their protection, and others should stand with them. But we should also see the Haitian, the Cameroonian, the Ethiopian, the South Sudanese, the Afghan put on a plane to an African country he has never seen, the Venezuelan separated from his family, the Latin American sent to Congo, and the African migrant trapped in Libya or attacked by another African in South Africa.

We should even be able to see the Afrikaner who genuinely fears persecution. If our belief in refugee protection changes according to the race, nationality or politics of the refugee, it is not much of a principle.

Ilhan Omar herself reminds us of something that is easily lost when refugees are discussed only as victims. Refugees have agency. A former refugee can become a member of Congress and confront the president of the United States. But nobody should have to become Ilhan Omar to earn the right to dignity. Refugees should not have to be extraordinary, politically useful, economically profitable or endlessly grateful before we recognize their humanity.

That is why the target is larger than Somalia. The deeper problem is the willingness to sort human beings into desirable and undesirable, believable and unbelievable, useful and disposable. Trump makes that sorting unusually visible, but it did not begin with Trump and it does not stop at the borders of the United States. The answer cannot be Somali solidarity alone, Haitian solidarity alone or even African solidarity alone. It has to be human solidarity. A person does not become less human because a government has decided that somebody else should deal with him.

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