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Federal Judge Orders Trump DHS to Return Man to US After Deportation to Equatorial Guinea
Since being deported, Ahmed Soliman "has been confined under armed guard, assaulted, held at gunpoint, and, most recently, arrested, hooded, beaten, and held incommunicado," said the judge.
Oct 08, 2026
A lawyer for Ahmed Soliman, a 31-year-old Phoenix man who has been arbitrarily detained in Equatorial Guinea since April, when US immigration agents forced him onto a plane under the Trump administration's third-country deportation policy, expressed cautious optimism and relief on Wednesday after a federal judge ruled that the Department of Homeland Security must return Soliman to the United States.
"We all frankly broke into tears of relief, and hope" when the ruling in the US District Court of Arizona was handed down, Dana Camilleri, a senior attorney at Green Evans-Schroeder, told the Arizona Daily Star.
District Judge John C. Hinderaker, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, ordered DHS to "take all reasonable steps within their control" to facilitate Soliman's return to the US.
Soliman's removal to Equatorial Guinea violated his due process rights under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, said Hinderaker, who said the man has faced "irreparable harm" after being "unlawfully" deported.
As Common Dreams reported last month, human rights advocates have warned that Soliman has been placed at risk of being tortured in Equatorial Guinea, where he and dozens of other people deported by the Trump administration have been held at a decommissioned hotel in Malabo.
None of the prisoners have any ties to Equatorial Guinea, which Trump paid $7.5 million in one of several secretive deals, in exchange for taking deportees whom the US is barred from sending to their home countries due to their credible fear of persecution.
Last month, Soliman was targeted for arrest in Equatorial Guinea after he spoke out about the abuse that he and others have faced at the hotel.
He has since been held "incommunicado" at a jail, despite the fact that he has not been charged with a crime.
Soliman's family in Arizona "have been left waiting, without any assurance that he is safe—or even still alive," Jesse Evans-Schroeder, another lawyer representing him, told the Star.
A video that was shared with the press last month showed armed guards pointing a gun at Soliman and another man in the hotel lobby. According to Amnesty International, after the video was shared, Soliman was taken to an overcrowded jail where he has been denied food and access to counsel.
"The unrebutted record shows that, since his removal, [Soliman] has been confined under armed guard, assaulted, held at gunpoint, and, most recently, arrested, hooded, beaten, and held incommunicado, reportedly without food or water," Hinderaker wrote in his order.
Since Amnesty, United Nations rights experts, and US Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) have raised alarm about Soliman's case, DHS has been dismissive of his ordeal, sneering in one social media post that a New York Times article on the case was a "poor excuse for a sob story" and that he and another detainee, Samson Birhane, "are CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIENS with rap sheets a mile long."
Soliman arrived in the US when he was 4, after his family fled Egypt, where they had faced persecution due to their political activities.
He lost his immigration status after being convicted of driving under the influence in 2021. Soliman has said in media interviews that he developed substance abuse problems as he came to terms with his identity as a gay man, having grown up in a conservative household.
He served two-and-a-half years in prison after the car accident that led to his conviction. While serving his sentence, Soliman "rehabilitated himself, confronting the 'self-hatred' he said led to his addiction," the Star reported.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement ordered his deportation in October 2025. His attorneys had won protections against his deportation to Egypt, based on his LGBTQ+ identity and his family's history there.
But under the Trump administration's third-country deportation policy and deals with dozens of governments that the White House has spent $40 million brokering, about 25,000 people have been sent to countries where they have no ties. From there, many have been sent on to their home countries, while others have been detained and faced ill treatment.
When Soliman was forced onto a deportation flight in April, he was given no opportunity to contest the decision to send him to Equatorial Guinea, where homosexuality is effectively criminalized and where authorities are known to perpetrate arbitrary detentions and torture.
A federal court ruled last month that DHS must provide deportees with meaningful notice and an opportunity to be screened for a credible fear of being sent to the third country. The US Supreme Court stayed that ruling, clearing the way for the Trump administration to continue abruptly removing people from the country, as it did with Soliman. The court is set to hear arguments in DVD v. DHS, a case challenging the third-country deportations, in December.
On Wednesday, Hinderaker gave the Trump administration's lawyers three days to provide the court with an update on its progress in returning Soliman to the US. DHS has 30 days to appeal his ruling. Soliman could still be removed to another country later, but Hinderaker ordered DHS to give him a "meaningful opportunity" for a credible fear screening.
Camilleri told The American Prospect that the legal team was "still thinking of everyone who’s confined at the hotel there and wanting to get them home."
The judge's ruling was "a great step forward, but I’m a little cautious, honestly," she said.
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In Africa, Changing the Crops Without Changing the System Is Not Good Enough
Who will control the seeds, science, and markets behind the new interest in Africa’s Indigenous crops?
Sep 27, 2026
Millet, sorghum, fonio, Bambara groundnut, cowpea, amaranth, pigeon pea, taro. For decades these crops were treated as the food of the past. Research money, extension, subsidies, and markets went to maize, wheat, and rice. Yet African farmers, most of them women, kept planting them, saving the seed, sharing it with neighbors, and cooking with them. They did it with very little help.
Now, suddenly, the same crops are fashionable. Climate change, poor diets, and tired soils have pushed them into conference halls and donor strategies. I welcome that. But I keep coming back to one question: Who gets to decide what happens to them next?
The question hit me again at a side event on African adapted crops during the Africa Food Systems Forum, hosted by the Africa Adaptation Crops Initiative, the Food Action Alliance, AGRA, TechnoServe, and Bain & Company. I went in encouraged. Before long, the discussion had slipped into a familiar script: raise productivity, formalize seed, mechanize, attract private investment, link farmers to big buyers. I am not against research, processing, or markets. My worry is what happens when crops that African communities developed and protected over generations are treated first as business opportunities. We could change the crop and leave the system exactly as it was.
Let the women who kept these crops alive sit where decisions are taken. And judge success by diets, biodiversity, soil health, incomes, and farmers’ control over seed, not only by tons and dollars.
The same worry applies to the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, known as VACS. It was launched by the US State Department with the African Union and Food and Agriculture Organization to promote diverse, nutritious, climate-adapted crops grown in healthy soils. On paper, it takes neglected crops seriously and brings soil back into the conversation. Both are long overdue. So the issue is not whether to invest, but what kind of investment, and controlled by whom.
Look at who was in the room when VACS was designed. Early research profiling possible “opportunity crops” was backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, and in December 2023 Washington announced $150 million in support for that year. African farmer organizations were not consulted while the program was being planned. Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, whose members have campaigned for years to promote nutritious local crops, was never approached. When the journalist Alexander Zaitchik asked me about it, I had to tell him that nobody from VACS’ leadership or affiliate groups had ever reached out to us or our networks.
Who was at the table instead? Zaitchik’s reporting for Truthdig, from the World Food Prize’s Borlaug Dialogue in Des Moines, is revealing. Cargill, Bayer, Syngenta, and John Deere are listed as “VACS champions,” alongside the Rockefeller and Gates foundations. The World Food Prize Foundation, where VACS was showcased, is chaired by a former president of Corteva, the seed giant formed from the Dow and DuPont merger. Cary Fowler, the US special envoy who championed VACS, has told audiences that “the answers to the world’s food insecurity issues may lie in for-profit companies.” When the world’s biggest grain, seed, and agrochemical companies are champions of a program on Africa’s seeds, and African farmers are not even asked, we are entitled to ask whose programme it really is.
Zaitchik’s larger point is that VACS, for all its new language, carries the assumptions of the Green Revolution. The crops are different, but outside expertise is still placed above farmers’ knowledge, and yields above food sovereignty. It was telling that at a 2023 VACS event, then Secretary of State Antony Blinken held up Norman Borlaug as the precedent. The pattern is familiar: Experts define the problem, breeders supply the technology, financiers bring the money, companies build the markets, and farmers adopt and supply.
And opportunity for whom? For the woman who has kept Bambara groundnut varieties alive? For the farmer selling millet at the weekly market? For a public breeder at an African university? Or for a seed company, a food multinational, or investors looking for the next growth market? These interests are not the same.
This is why seed is the heart of the matter. CGIAR, VACS’ main research partner, reports breeding work on Bambara groundnut, finger millet, okra, sesame, taro, amaranth, and pigeon pea, guided by market intelligence and “Target Product Profiles.” VACS officials say CGIAR treats its seeds as public goods. But what outside actors do with those seeds, including patenting them, is up to them. With seed companies among the champions, the risk is plain: Crops that farmers bred over centuries could become more valuable just as farmers lose control of them. As I told Zaitchik, no project involved in advancing punitive seed patent regimes has the interest of African farmers at heart. Seed governance, farmers’ rights, and benefit sharing must be settled before breeding programs are designed, not after.
Farmers have been plant breeders for thousands of years, and diversity is Africa’s real strength: hundreds of cereals, legumes, vegetables, fruits, roots, and local varieties. Once donors and markets pick a short list of “opportunity crops,” money and breeding capacity crowd around them. My concern is everything left off the list. Diversity is not inefficiency. It is our insurance. A farm with millet, cowpea, vegetables, fruit trees,and a few animals may produce fewer tons of millet than a monoculture, but more nutrition, fodder, healthier soil, and a steadier income in a bad year. Judge only the millet yield and we will end up with higher-yielding Indigenous crops on simpler, more fragile farms.
Markets need the same care. A mother buying millet in a village market is demand. A school buying vegetables from nearby farms is demand. Public procurement by schools and hospitals could create reliable markets for these foods and keep money in local economies. Processors and exporters can take part, but policy should not be written backward from their specifications.
So what would I ask of AGRA, VACS, and the others? Start by talking to African farmer movements, and give them a real say in governing research agendas, not a consultation after the decisions are made. Put public money into farmer-managed seed systems and participatory breeding. Commit clearly that seeds developed from African crops will not end up under corporate patents. Let the women who kept these crops alive sit where decisions are taken. And judge success by diets, biodiversity, soil health, incomes, and farmers’ control over seed, not only by tons and dollars.
The world has discovered that crops African farmers refused to abandon may matter for everyone’s climate future. But they were never lost. They were being planted, selected, exchanged, cooked, and protected all along. The people who did that work must not now become raw-material suppliers for someone else’s revolution. Africa’s crops do not need rescuing from African farmers. They need investment that puts those farmers at the center of what comes next.
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Trump's Third Country Removal Policy Putting Unlawfully Detained Men At Risk of Torture: Amnesty
The group believes Ahmed Soliman and Samson Birhane were targeted by police in Equatorial Guinea for speaking out about poor treatment in the hotel they were detained in following their deportation.
Sep 18, 2026
As Amnesty International warned that two men are now at risk of being tortured in detention in Equatorial Guinea, where the Trump administration deported them earlier this year under one of several secretive deals, US. Rep. Adelita Grijalva said that the "ultimate responsibility lies with" the White House, which sent the men "into harm's way."
The human rights group issued an urgent appeal, calling on supporters to send letters to the vice president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, saying that that Ahmed Soliman, an Egyptian national, and Samson Birhane, who is from Eritrea, were "beaten and violently taken by police officers from the Hotel Bamy in Malabo," the capital of Equatorial Guinea.
They had been "arbitrarily" held at the hotel along with dozens of other people since US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent them there on deportation flights earlier this year. Soliman and Birhane had protection from refoulement to their countries of origin from US immigration courts, but President Donald Trump's administration has arranged with five governments, through direct payments of tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, to send hundreds of migrants to countries where they have never lived—many with records of human rights abuses.
Soliman has publicly spoken out against their arbitrary detention, and international media recently published a video showing a police officer at Hotel Bamy pointing a weapon at him and another man.
Last Friday, days after the video went public, said Amnesty, Soliman and Birhane were "targeted" by police, who arrived at the hotel and took them away briefly.
Amnesty continued in its letter and call to action:
Later during the day police officers went back to the hotel, bringing Ahmed Soliman and Samson Birhane back with them, who had their heads covered with bags tied with a rope. Police officers beat them in their heads, backs, and ribs with their elbows, knees, and guns, asking them where they hid the phones. They pushed one of the men down the stairs of the hotel and said to others that they may never see Ahmed Soliman and Samson Birhane again.
The group wrote that the men were taken "the Malabo gendarmery station known as 'La Luna'" and were accused of breaking a mirror at the hotel.
"Since then, they have not been informed of the charges against them, nor allowed to speak to their lawyers, and are held in an overcrowded police cell, in inhumane conditions," reads the sample letter. "I am concerned that they are at heightened risk of torture."
The New York Times reported that a lawyer who has been able to get some information about Soliman and Birhane's condition said they have been denied food and are "covered in bruises."
"The authorities must immediately release them, inform them of any charges against them, and allow them unimpeded access to counsel," said Amnesty International.
Officials in the Trump administration, said Grijalva (D-Ariz.), "need to take responsibility and demand Ahmed’s immediate release."
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Health Aid Cuts in Secret Trump Deals Will Inflict 'Preventable' Death, Disease on Global South: Report
"It will be patients who will pay the ultimate price," said one global health advocate.
Aug 31, 2026
The US Congress has pushed back against President Donald Trump's efforts to slash foreign aid, which has long been supported by Democrats and Republicans alike—but a new report on more than a dozen Memoranda of Understanding that the White House has reached with countries that have long relied heavily on healthcare assistance shows that the administration is underspending "congressionally appropriated global health funds by potentially billions of dollars," as it pushes its "America First Global Health Strategy."
That's according to Public Citizen, which on Sunday joined Partners In Health in releasing an analysis of documents that the two nonprofits obtained after suing the Trump administration and filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The groups reviewed the MOUs that have been signed for 18 out of 34 countries whose agreements have been negotiated by the US State Department, including Rwanda, Liberia, Burundi, and Madagascar.
Although Congress has voted to keep foreign aid levels relatively constant—rejecting a budget that called to slash global health spending by $6.2 billion before approving one that proposed a $615 million decrease in spending—the report finds that the MOUs cut foreign health aid by about $2 billion by 2030, compared to 2024 levels.
“These documents suggest that the Trump administration is on course to underspend on global health by billions of dollars compared to what Congress has ordered, risking lives and allowing diseases to spread,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines program at Public Citizen. “The administration must answer how and when it intends to invest the missing billions for health.”
Overall, funding for programs that aim to prevent the spread of diseases including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and Ebola—which is currently spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo's fastest-spreading outbreak on record—is set to be reduced by 59% from historical spending, according to the MOUs viewed by Public Citizen and Partners in Health.
Some countries would see their health assistance from the US plummet even more, with Rwanda's MOU stipulating a 97% reduction in US health aid. Liberia is set to receive 84% less funding for health initiatives by 2030, and Burundi is set to lose 78% of its aid.
"Partners In Health provides direct care in Rwanda, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, along with seven other countries, and expects under-spending of these funds to impact patients’ access to care," said Public Citizen.
The MOUs also demand that the countries meet strict co-financing requirements to make up for their lost funding, and governments in poor countries across Africa could face penalties "which could worsen funding cuts" if they miss the co-financing targets.
"The planned decreases in US funding are larger for several countries than the funding increases from partner governments," reads the report. "For more than half of countries (11 out of 18), co-financing commitments fall short of the US government’s cuts over five years compared to baseline US government funding."
Countries are likely to struggle to meet the co-financing requirements in the MOUs, warned Public Citizen and Partners In Health.
Malawi would be required to secure new healthcare funding equal to 56% of the country's total health expenditure, the report found. With Uganda also facing co-financing requirements from international health organizations including the Global Fund and Gavi, the East African country would be required to mobilize funds equal to 44% of its total health budget.
"These funding cuts will cause death and disease that is preventable,” said Vincent Lin, associate director of health policy and advocacy for Partners In Health. “The State Department is setting up other countries for failure with the co-financing requirements outlined in these agreements, but it will be patients who will pay the ultimate price.”
Maybarduk told The Washington Post that Sierra Leone will be required under its MOU to fill a 71% health funding gap by 2030.
“It’s going to be very difficult, and if a country like that falls behind, and then is punished for that, then of course the health problems compound," said Maybarduk.
The State Department denied to the Post that the Trump administration will not spend all the foreign health assistance funds appropriated by Congress; it suggested that more of the money than usual may go to religious organizations as well as an "innovation fund" to support US technology that aims to fight disease.
Last week, Public Citizen sued the Trump administration under FOIA to obtain the rest of the MOUs that remain hidden from the public.
The White House, said the group, "has kept the public in the dark about the full details of its plans for the future of US support for global health."
"The State Department has negotiated these bilateral agreements," the group said, "on rushed timelines with limited participation from civil society and affected communities."
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Amnesty Calls for 'Global Solidarity' as Ebola Outbreak Becomes Worst in DRC's History
"The people of the DRC deserve the world’s attention, resources, care, and solidarity," said one advocate.
Aug 17, 2026
As the Ebola crisis that was first detected in the Democratic Republic of Congo in May became the deadliest outbreak of the disease in the country's history on Monday, one global public health expert in the United Kingdom pointed to the key difference between the 2014 epidemic in West Africa and the one that has now killed at least 2,325 people in the DRC.
In 2014, wrote Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, in The Guardian, the US and other wealthy countries "worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) to escalate a response, bringing military-like coordination, necessary resources, logistics, and trained personnel."
Now, said Sridhar, "we’ve had two 'America-First'" terms of President Donald Trump.
"The US is no longer part of the WHO or working multilaterally, favoring a 'go-it-alone' response," she wrote.
In Trump's second term, the president cut tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid spending. Data released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in April showed the US spent 56.9% less on foreign assistance last year after Trump dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID), cut smaller programs, and demanded that Congress rescind billions that had already been appropriated for countries and programs in need.
Ebola has become the DRC's worst-ever outbreak in just three months, wrote Sridhar, "in the context of the defunding of foreign aid, the censorship of scientists, the closure of USAID, the implosion of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a 'Make America Healthy Again' movement."
By the time officials announced that the outbreak had been detected in May, they had already recorded 246 suspected cases and 80 suspected deaths in Ituri province—suggesting that US aid and public health cuts had "undermined some of the surveillance and detection initiatives that might have helped to catch this earlier," as Jeremy Konyndyk of Refugees International said at the time.
Months after getting a significant head start in spreading throughout the population, Ebola has now been detected in six of the DRC's 26 provinces, and the country's public health institute has recorded at least 4,945 cases, with 101 detected in the 24 hours preceding Monday's announcement.
Ebola "is winning in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” said the United Nations last Friday, noting that the epidemic was killing one person every 30 minutes.
Amnesty International called on the globa; community to urgently try to make up for the surveillance failures that happened earlier this year and mobilize to slow the outbreak.
"We call for global solidarity as eastern DRC faces its deadliest Ebola outbreak in the country's history," said Amnesty. "Human rights must continue to be prioritized as health workers treat the disease across the region."
The US State Department said earlier this month that it has provided $512 million in direct assistance to help respond to the outbreak—far less than the $5.4 billion the US enacted in December 2014 to fight the epidemic in West Africa.
US spending is lagging as the outbreak has become the fastest-growing in the history of the virus, as The Guardian reported Monday. The 2014 outbreak took five months to reach 1,000 deaths, but more than 2,000 people have died of Ebola in less than three months since the disease was detected.
Thomas Parisch, a public health specialist with Doctors Without Borders in the DRC, told The Guardian that the country still appears to be struggling with the limits imposed by aid cuts.
"Normally, as an outbreak progresses, the case fatality ratio should fall as contact tracing improves and patients are identified and treated earlier," said Parisch. "Instead, we’re still seeing many cases detected very late, when treatment is less likely to succeed, with many identified only after they die in the community.”
The outbreak also differs from previous epidemics in that the current Ebola infections are being caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus. There are no approved vaccines or treatments for the strain, but WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said recently that two new vaccines were being tested on people.
Lawyer and advocate Bernice King urged the public to "refuse to look away."
"Nonviolence is an active commitment to protect life," said King. "The people of the DRC deserve the world’s attention, resources, care, and solidarity."
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'All Hands on Deck': UN Urges Expanded Response as DRC Ebola Outbreak Spreads at Record Pace
"We need to massively step up our response," said one senior UN official, while another stressed that "Ebola feeds on delay, fear, and hunger."
Jul 31, 2026
As the official death toll from the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo topped 1,500, United Nations officials called for a dramatic expansion of humanitarian assistance to combat what's now the fastest-spreading outbreak of the deadly disease ever recorded.
The DRC's Health Ministry on Friday confirmed more than 3,400 infections and at least 1,556 deaths since the outbreak was declared in May. The ministry said the fatality rate during the current epidemic is 44%.
The epidemic is caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus, which has spread across multiple DRC provinces, with the vast majority of cases concentrated in Ituri Province. Unlike the Zaire strain from previous outbreaks, there is currently no approved vaccine or treatment for the Bundibugyo virus.
The current epidemic has killed more people faster than any previous outbreak, including in 2014-16, when more than 28,000 infections and over 11,000 deaths were reported.
"In the last 24 hours, 50 people have died of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the number of cases is growing exponentially, doubling every 20 days,” senior United Nations aiEbola coordinator Julien Harneis said during a Wednesday press conference in New York.
“So, in support of the government, I'm calling that we step up, across the response, the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, member states,” Harneis continued. "We need to massively step up our response, be it in terms of supplies, specialized supplies like personal protective equipment, staff, specialized medical staff, and logistics as well.”
Harneis spoke at the press conference with acting UN World Food Program Executive Director Carl Skau, who said that "Ebola feeds on delay, fear, and hunger."
“Stopping this outbreak requires all hands on deck and communities at the center," he continued. "Food assistance is frontline Ebola containment. It helps families stay home, supports safe isolation, builds trust with communities, and keeps health teams moving. We know what works; what we need now is the speed and resources to scale it before this outbreak outruns the response.”
Skau noted that around 10 million people are suffering from acute food insecurity in the eastern DRC, with 3 million of those in an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)-designated "emergency"—one step away from famine.
“You cannot force people to choose between hunger and health,” he said.
Compounding the crisis, a growing number of Ebola patients are dying outside of treatment centers. Officials said that more than 60% of recent Ebola deaths have occurred in communities, increasing the risk of further transmission through unsafe caregiving and burial practices.
Health workers also continue to endure attacks by armed groups, which have forced aid organizations to suspend operations in some of the hardest-hit areas of the epidemic.
Some experts also pointed to US President Donald Trump’s ideologically driven decision to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization, his administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, and reduced funding for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s global public health efforts as adversely affecting the response to the current Ebola epidemic, especially when compared with outbreaks in 2014 and 2019.
Meanwhile, health officials in neighboring Uganda this week declared an end to the country's Bundibugyo outbreak after no new cases were reported for a month. Twenty people were infected, and three died, in Uganda.
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'Idiot Reich': US State Department Map Mislabeled African Nations
"This is what happens when the US Department of State fires career experts and tries to have AI conduct diplomacy."
Jul 30, 2026
"AI use gone wrong." "Utter embarrassment." "Stupid empire." "Idiot Reich."
Those were just some of the responses to Thursday reporting on a US Department of State map presented at a global conference in Brazil that mislabeled every African country it included.
"Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the State Department's new health agreements," the news agency reported.
"A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools," the outlet noted. "The company said it was investigating the report."
While Jeff Graham, who oversees the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and was speaking at the conference, did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment, the State Department said that "we take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners."
Critics around the world, including Democrats in Congress, blasted the department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump, who have reduced staff by 3,000 between layoffs and voluntary departures.
A recent Financial Times article headlined "RIP the US State Department" noted that "as of late June more than half of American ambassadorships were vacant, including high-status posts from Germany to Saudi Arabia," and nearly 80% of American embassies across Africa lack an ambassador.
Sharing the Reuters reporting on social media Thursday, Nick Cleveland-Stout, a research associate in the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, commented, "Checking in on the whole defund the State Department thing."
Former US Ambassador to Jamaica Luis Moreno said that "this is the pathetic result when you fire career, nonpartisan diplomatic personnel and replace them with unqualified partisan hacks who rely on faulty AI."
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) declared: "What an embarrassment. This is what happens when the US Department of State fires career experts and tries to have AI conduct diplomacy."
Congressman Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) stressed that "Trump's Department of State showed up to a global conference with an AI-generated map that mislabeled nations across Africa. Every. Single. One. This isn't just an embarrassing mistake."
"It's a symbol of an administration that has treated a continent of 1.5 billion people as an afterthought while China is deepening engagement across the African continent," he argued. "That's what happens when you hollow out expertise and stop taking diplomacy seriously. Our African partners and the American people deserve better."
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Critics Warn US Bilateral Health Deals With African Nations Threaten Pandemic Equity Efforts
“Trump is exploiting African states’ urgent need to restore lifesaving health aid," said one campaigner.
Jul 30, 2026
US Department of State text messages detailing health agreements between the Trump administration and African nations have sparked fresh alarm among public health advocates, who warn that the coercive deals could allow the United States to secure access to virus samples and valuable data while failing to guarantee that countries providing them will receive vaccines, treatments, and other benefits in return.
Public Citizen said Thursday that it had analyzed documents concerning the Trump administration's terms for sharing pathogen data in health agreements with African nations. The consumer advocacy group described these terms as "unfair" and said that they threaten "to undermine the core equity bargain of the [World Health Organization's] Pandemic Agreement negotiations."
The conditions of the proposed deals, said Public Citizen, "would require African states to share viral samples and pathogen information with the US and allow the US to share that information with drugmakers, but provide no credible expectation of benefits in return or access to medical tools developed from those samples."
"This undercuts the federated proposal for viral sharing with access benefits put forward this month at WHO negotiations by the Africa+ Group, which includes all countries for which bilateral specimen agreements are available," Public Citizen added.
At the center of the controversy are agreements that tie US health assistance—which has been eviscerated by the Trump administration with widespread deadly consequences—to commitments involving disease surveillance, data sharing, and, in some cases, the exchange of pathogen samples.
Supporters argue the deals strengthen America's ability to detect and respond to emerging infectious diseases while providing partner countries with much-needed funding after devastating cuts to US aid. Public health advocates, however, contend the agreements shift power away from multilateral institutions and toward one-on-one negotiations in which lower-income countries have less leverage against the world's wealthiest and most powerful nation.
As Common Dreams reported last month, President Donald Trump's so-called “America First” approach to global health strategy is characterized by transactional agreements with African governments to restore some funding. Human rights advocates have raised concerns about the possibly coercive nature of this strategy.
“Trump is exploiting African states’ urgent need to restore lifesaving health aid and pushing them to give up a shot at real lifesaving medical access and equity, for which so many people have worked, bled, and died,” Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen's Access to Medicines program, said Thursday in a statement. "African states at WHO have led the way in efforts to secure a fair deal and cooperation to fight pandemics, but individually, these states are vulnerable to Trump’s threats.”
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Calls Grow to Boycott 'The Odyssey,' Filmed in Moroccan-Occupied Western Sahara
One critic noted that Sahrawis "are beaten, arbitrarily arrested, and have their equipment confiscated for trying to make their own films of life under occupation."
Jul 15, 2026
Sahrawi activists and filmmakers are leading renewed calls to boycott the big-screen adaptation of Homer's ancient Greek epic The Odyssey over filmmaker Christopher Nolan's decision to shoot the film in the Western Sahara, whose people have suffered Moroccan occupation for over half a century.
"It is deeply disturbing that while Sahrawi journalists are imprisoned for exposing abuses, an international film production can use our homeland as a cinematic backdrop without addressing the reality of the occupation," Sahrawi journalist and filmmaker Mamine Hachimi told Middle East Eye (MEE) in an interview published on Wednesday.
Hachimi, who co-directed the short documentary Three Stolen Cameras about the oppression of people who document human rights crimes committed by Moroccan occupiers, told MEE's Alex MacDonald that calls to boycott The Odyssey—which was filmed in the Western Saharan city of Dakhla and opens on Friday—"is not a campaign against cinema or artistic freedom, it is a call for ethical responsibility."
"Two of my colleagues, Abdallah Lhafaouni, who is serving a life sentence, and Bachir Khadda, who is serving a 20-year sentence, are political prisoners simply because they documented human rights violations in occupied Western Sahara," Hachimi said.
Another Sahrawi filmmaker, Mohamedsalem Werad, told MEE that "choosing to film in occupied Western Sahara was not a politically neutral production decision—it meant operating with the permission of the occupying power in a territory where the Sahrawi people have long been denied the opportunity to exercise their right to self-determination."
"A boycott sends a clear message that filmmakers cannot expect audiences to overlook decisions that risk legitimizing an occupation," he added.
Sarah Yerkes, a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote last week that The Odyssey "has a colonialism problem."
"For Morocco, the territories that make up Western Sahara are referred to as the 'southern provinces' and are an indisputable part of the kingdom," Yerkes noted. "But... Dakhla is part of what is considered the occupied and non-self-governing Western Sahara under existing international law."
"The Sahrawi people, who are indigenous to the region and currently have no meaningful self-determination, have not consented to the film’s production—and the Moroccan government is reaping the rewards at their expense," she added.
The renewed calls to boycott The Odyssey follow last year's appeal, led by the Western Sahara International Film Festival and signed by hundreds of artists, journalists, activists, and other human rights defenders, urging Nolan, Universal Pictures, and producers of the film "to break their silence and cease to be accomplices to Morocco’s 50-year illegal occupation."
The government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which claims sovereignty over Western Sahara but is not recognized by the United Nations, has also condemned what it called "an attempt to film a cinematic work in occupied Dakhla, considering it a violation of international legitimacy and the ethics of cultural and artistic work."
Morocco has occupied Western Sahara since 1975, when Spanish forces withdrew from their former colony in the dying days of longtime dictator Francisco Franco's regime. Moroccan warplanes bombed Sahrawis, many of whom fled into neighboring Algeria as the government under King Hassan II orchestrated a “Green March” of hundreds of thousands of Moroccan civilians into the phosphate- and fishery-rich territory.
Western Sahara is today known among locals and human rights advocates as “Africa’s last colony.” Moroccan forces have brutally oppressed the Sahrawi people under their rule, severely restricting freedom of expression, movement, association, and the press, and utilizing arbitrary arrest and torture as tools of repression, according to human rights groups.
Moroccan occupation forces also built a 1,700-mile mostly sand wall to keep Algerian-backed Sahrawi militants led by the Polisario Front out of the territory, while denying people inside their occupied homeland a United Nations-backed referendum they’ve been awaiting for decades.
During his first term, US President Donald Trump recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, essentially in exchange for Morocco’s decision to normalize relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords.
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Despite Court Protection Orders, Trump Admin Deports Refugees to War-Torn Central African Republic, Putting ‘Lives at Risk’
“It’s hard to fathom how deeply evil this is,” said Sen. Chris Murphy.
Jun 12, 2026
The US government advises Americans not to travel to the Central African Republic "for any reason." But it just deported nearly two dozen people to the war-torn country, including several refugees who fled persecution in other nations.
On Friday morning, Human Rights First's deportation flight tracker reported that a plane used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had landed in Accra, Ghana, after departing from Louisiana the previous day and was believed to be en route to the CAR's capital, Bangui.
Per The New York Times on Thursday, the administration was preparing to deport "at least two Iranian women who had sought refuge in the United States" as well as "migrants from Afghanistan and Syria."
According to their lawyers, several of the migrants had received court orders from judges prohibiting their deportation to their home countries, citing the risk of persecution there.
A lawyer for one of the Iranian women told the Times that neither of them has a criminal record and that they both have been granted court protection due to fear of threats to their freedom or lives if they returned to Iran. One is a Christian convert, and the other is a pro-democracy activist.
According to Reuters, just the activist ended up on the flight from Louisiana. But the Christian woman is still at risk, along with another Iranian national.
Human Rights First's @ICEFlightM is monitoring this egregious situation, and we urge our policy makers to decry this life-threatening flight and other deals that send people seeking safety back to the very harms from which they fled.
https://t.co/ABZZMTQNuS
— Human Rights First (@humanrights1st) June 11, 2026
The burden of proof to receive what is known as a “withholding of removal” status from an immigration judge is even higher than that needed for migrants to qualify for asylum.
Those seeking their deportations to be halted must demonstrate that it’s more likely than not that their life or freedom would be threatened if they returned to a specific country due to their race, religion, nationality, or political or social affiliation.
In order to get around orders protecting these migrants from deportation to their home countries, the administration is instead dumping them in what have been described as "third countries."
The flight departed on Thursday is the first US deportation flight to the CAR, which is one of the poorest countries in the world and is reeling from a civil war that's displaced more than a million people both inside and outside the country.
The country is under the State Department's highest travel advisory, warning US citizens not to go there "due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health, and terrorism."
This is the @StateDept travel advisory for the Central African Republic.
The United States—a self-proclaimed nation of refuge—is about to send refugees here. https://t.co/uxfexS5S73 pic.twitter.com/pvYyxIQHdN
— Sarah Pierce (@SarahPierceEsq) June 11, 2026
"People on this flight proved to a judge that they were likely to be persecuted in their home countries," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. "This is profoundly unjust."
Human rights law experts Anjli Parrin and Savi Arvey wrote on Wednesday for Just Security that the administration was putting "lives at risk" by sending these migrants to a dangerous country where they know nobody and where basic healthcare infrastructure hardly exists.
They said the administration's deportation of these migrants "is the latest example of its dangerous and potentially life-threatening strategy: using secretive deals with countries to expel asylum seekers and migrants with no legal or personal connection to the places where they are being sent."
"Since early last year, the US government has signed a growing number of third-country forced transfer agreements with over 30 countries worldwide to expel and deport people to places where they have no legal or personal ties," they said.
"These deportations are often carried out in secrecy and without any semblance of due process," they added. "Individuals are often not given any advance warning or the opportunity to challenge their deportation to a third country—with many only discovering they are being sent to a country they may have never heard of while airborne."
Emily Trostle, a lawyer for the Iranian activist, told Reuters that the migrants facing deportation to the CAR "have absolutely no connection to this place."
“These individuals are being removed from the United States and abandoned in a country where they have no status, no connection, and no support network,” she said. “We fear they will ultimately be forced to return to the countries they originally fled.”
According to Human Rights First's Third Country Deportation Watch, governments around the world have been given $44 million from US taxpayers to receive these migrants. More than 19,000 people, it found, have been deported across 24 countries.
Most of them have been sent to Mexico, but the US has also shipped migrants to some of the poorest, most unstable nations in sub-Saharan Africa, including Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, and Sierra Leone. Many have faced arbitrary detention and torture or been returned to the country where they fled persecution.
In order to avoid having to allow over 1,000 Afghans who fought alongside US soldiers to settle as refugees in the US as planned, the Trump administration is reportedly trying to ink a deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo to take them instead, but the plan was stalled amid public backlash, and the administration is seeking other options.
It's hard to fathom how deeply evil this is, and that we have people running our country who get sick pleasure from sending women fleeing violence in Iran to an African country in the middle of a brutal civil war. https://t.co/JaN8z2LFI2
— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 11, 2026
The Iranian American Legal Defense Fund said on Thursday that the deportation of Iranian nationals was a “potentially fatal action,” as they could face danger in the CAR or be sent back to Iran.
Another person scheduled to be deported to the CAR was an elderly man from Syria, whose immigration attorney, Margaret Stock, told the Times that he had scars all over his body due to torture in his home country.
He is a Sufi Muslim and feared persecution if he returned there, and is in danger of lacking access to care for his diabetes if sent to the CAR. According to Stock, he received an emergency temporary order halting his deportation.
Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee in charge of funding for the Department of Homeland Security and its immigration agencies, responded to the Times report on the deportations with outrage.
"It's hard to fathom how deeply evil this is, and that we have people running our country who get sick pleasure from sending women fleeing violence in Iran to an African country in the middle of a brutal civil war," he said.
Reichlin-Melnick agreed: "Evil is the right word for... taking people who are safe in the United States, who have proven to a judge they would be persecuted in their home country, and dumping them in a random country in the middle of a civil war."
"No previous administration would have done this, despite it likely being legal," he added.
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