Trump administration fights order to bring Minnesota man back from Central Africa

The Trump administration is appealing a federal judge's order to return a Nicaraguan asylum seeker from Minnesota whom ICE deported to the Central African Republic in August. Kenis Lopez Gonzalez, who was shielded from removal to Nicaragua, says he is stranded in Bangui with no papers and no protection.

The Trump administration is trying to put on hold a Minnesota federal court order to bring back a Nicaraguan asylum seeker it deported to the Central African Republic, a country where he has no connections, no legal status and no protection from being sent on to Nicaragua. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan ruled on Oct. 30 that the government must return Kenis Lopez Gonzalez to Minnesota and release him from detention. Federal attorneys have since appealed and asked the judge to delay it, MPR News reported Friday.

Bryan has not yet ruled on that request, so his order stands for now.

From a Shakopee business to a bus in Texas

Lopez crossed into the U.S. from Mexico in 2022, turned himself in and settled in Shakopee, where he ran a construction company. Court findings say he has no criminal record. In 2024, an immigration judge ordered him removed but barred sending him to Nicaragua, where he said he had been jailed for months after the 2018 anti-government protests. He was released under supervision and attended his check-ins.

ICE agents arrested him outside his house in mid-January, during the federal immigration crackdown known as Operation Metro Surge. He spent seven months moving between detention centers in Texas and Louisiana. According to his court declaration, officers in military-style gear rounded up and restrained him and the roughly 40 other men in his Texas cell in late August, then put them on a bus. Hours later, they learned they were being flown to the Central African Republic.

When some of the men refused to get off the bus, agents fired projectiles at them. Lopez described them as rubber bullets, and photos filed in court show dark welts on his skin. The Minnesota Reformer reported that he was then put in a full-body restraint and carried onto the plane.

Judge calls government argument 'plainly disingenuous'

In a strongly worded preliminary injunction, Bryan found that ICE likely violated Lopez's rights when it ended his supervised release in January without following its own rules,. He wrote that the danger to Lopez in the Central African Republic was "self-evident" and was known to the government before it forced him onto the flight. He called the claim that Lopez faces no risk there "plainly disingenuous," citing the State Department's Level 4 "do not travel" advisory for the country.

The order sets a nine-step timeline for his return at government expense and bars officers from shooting him with rubber bullets or other projectiles. It does not decide whether third-country deportations are legal, a question the Supreme Court will hear in December. U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen has argued that Bryan should wait for that ruling, while Assistant U.S. Attorney David Fuller told the court that Lopez was not owed a hearing on the Central African Republic because his case had named only Nicaragua.

A Homeland Security Department spokesperson told Newsweek that the judge was "openly defying the Supreme Court," and said Lopez had received due process and a final removal order. "ICE violated Mr. Lopez's constitutional rights, and hardly even denied it," his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg told the magazine.

Central Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic

Lopez now lives in a former hotel in Bangui, the capital that is guarded by the U.N.-affiliated International Organization for Migration. He told MPR News by phone that the power and water go out constantly and that he has been sick much of the time. The IOM has offered to help him go to Nicaragua but nowhere else, he said, and without papers he fears arrest if he goes out.

More than 25,000 sent to third countries

Lopez is one of more than 25,000 immigrants deported to countries other than their own under President Donald Trump, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Migrants and Third Country Deportation Watch. The watchdog counted more than 170 people sent to the Central African Republic as of Oct. 27. The country agreed this year to take deportees after Washington gave the IOM $85 million for operations there. Sandoval-Moshenberg fears Lopez will eventually be sent on to Nicaragua anyway, calling the stop "a very inconvenient and very long layover" on the way to a country the U.S. is barred from deporting him to directly.

Rep. Angie Craig, a Minnesota Democrat, said on X that Lopez "fled political violence" and called third-country deportations "dangerous and unacceptable." Lopez, meanwhile, says he passes the days reading the Bible, exercising and calling his daughter in Houston when the power is on.

Photos: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Alllexxxis / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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