The Department of Homeland Security on Sunday called a New York Times report on alleged abuse of deportees a "hoax," as the United States continues to send people it cannot return home to third countries under deals financed with public money.

"Another day and another hoax about ICE detention from the @nytimes," DHS posted on X on Aug. 30 from its official account. "The media is clearly desperate for these false allegations to be true. NO ONE is being tortured, denied medical care, or beaten in ICE detention facilities."

The Times reported that it interviewed 10 people deported from the United States to Liberia or Equatorial Guinea, who described shackling and beatings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in detention and on a removal flight. This newsroom has not independently interviewed those people and did not obtain the Times's full text. DHS, which holds the statutory power to detain and remove, denied the allegations in public rather than in a detailed incident-by-incident account.

The flight sits inside a larger policy. On Aug. 19, Liberia's government said it "intends to accept up to 1,200 persons to be transferred from the United States of America within a year," among the larger known third-country arrangements of the Trump administration, RFI reported from the government's statement. A first group of 20 was due that week. Liberia said the people would be free to leave or to apply for asylum, and that it had "not demanded or received any compensation or promise of reward." It added that it would "receive support to help manage the programme."

The New York Times later reported, and other outlets repeated from internal State Department documents, that Washington approved a $5 million payment to Liberia for "migration management activities," approved in December and recorded in public spending data in January. The documents, as described, said the money could support shelter, food, and job training, and that State found Liberia's assurances against persecution credible. Liberia's public line that it took no compensation sits next to a U.S. payment the Times tied to the same arrangement. Both can be true in the bureaucratic sense. Only one of them is a check.

FrontPageAfrica, in Monrovia, reported that the first 20 third-country deportees landed at Roberts International Airport, and that five refused to leave the aircraft. AFP, via Arab News, reported that a Liberian government source said only 15 of the 20 disembarked, and that Information Minister Jerolinmek Matthew Piah told reporters the five "were not given to us." U.S. media reported they were flown on to Equatorial Guinea. DHS, per the Times's earlier coverage as summarized by other outlets, said the 20 were "deported to a safe third country" and did not account for the five in that phrase.

The authority is stacked. ICE executes removal. The State Department negotiates the receiving government and writes the grant. Liberia's cabinet accepts people with no claimed tie to Liberia. U.S. taxpayers fund the $5 million line. The people on the plane do not pick the destination. When they resist, American officers on a West African tarmac are the ones applying force. That is the policy, whether or not the Times's abuse allegations hold up in court or in a DHS investigation that has not been produced.

Sources