A federal judge in Minnesota has ordered the Trump administration to bring home a man it deported to a country he had never set foot in. Kenis Adalberto Lopez Gonzalez, a Nicaraguan construction worker from Shakopee, was sent in August to the Central African Republic, a place the State Department has told Americans not to visit since January.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan ordered the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to “arrange for and facilitate Lopez’s return to the United States from the Central African Republic by taking all reasonable steps within their control to do so.” The court found that immigration officials “likely violated his due-process rights,” and, as reported by Courthouse News, that ICE officers repeatedly ignored a court order protecting him and a pending habeas case while moving him around the country.
The protection was real. An immigration judge ruled in August 2024 that Lopez could not be deported to Nicaragua because he faced a risk of torture there. He arrived in 2022, reported to immigration authorities right away and, according to Newsweek, has no criminal record. ICE arrested him in January during Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. By the time his advocates lost contact with him in August, he was already gone. They found him in September in a facility in Bangui.
The court noted “serious and known risks to foreigners” in the Central African Republic, which carries a Level 4 “do not travel” advisory, the State Department’s highest.
“Kenis is a father, Kenis is a construction worker, and he was taken from us,” Lucho Gomez of the worker center CTUL told MPR News. His attorney, Courtney Moran, wants him returned to his life in Minnesota.
His case is one of many. Newsweek reported that more than 170 people have been transferred to Central Africa under the administration’s third-country arrangements. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has defended the policy, saying it lets the U.S. remove people “so barbaric that even their home countries won’t take them back.” Nothing in the court’s findings describes Lopez that way. He is a builder with a protection order and no criminal record, and the government sent him anyway.
This is why the policy matters to Black readers here and in Canada. African countries are being turned into the place where the U.S. sends people no court will let it send home, with little say for the people sent and few resources to receive them. Black immigrants already face detention and deportation in numbers out of proportion to their share of the immigrant population, and a policy that treats a Black-majority country as a disposal site tells them how their lives are weighed. The people it lands on are also the ones with the least money for lawyers.
The government has not said publicly whether it will comply or appeal. The order is a preliminary injunction, so the case continues, and the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a challenge to third-country deportations in December. Lopez cannot wait for December. A court told ICE what to do, and ICE has to show it can follow it.
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