NAIROBI/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has deported to Rwanda a resettled Iraqi refugee who it long tried to extradite in response to Iraqi government claims that he worked for the Islamic State, according to a U.S. official and an internal email.
Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, who was granted refugee status in the U.S. in 2014, denied Iraqi charges that he murdered a police officer as an IS operative, and a judge found in 2021 that the version of events in the case against him was “not plausible”.
But the administrations of Joe Biden and Donald Trump both pursued his removal from the country, accusing him of lying on his refugee application by saying he had not interacted with terrorist groups.
After the start of his second term in January, Trump launched a sweeping crackdown on immigration and attempted to freeze the U.S. refugee resettlement program.
Ameen was sent to Rwanda earlier this month, according to the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, and the internal email seen by Reuters.
A U.S. State Department spokesperson declined to comment on Ameen’s case, and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rwanda’s government spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Online news outlet The Handbasket, which broke the news of Ameen’s deportation, cited a leaked cable from the U.S. embassy in Kigali as saying that Rwanda had agreed to receive additional third-country nationals under a “new removal program”.
Reuters was not able to confirm the contents of the cable or any deal between the United States and Rwanda.
The central African country has positioned itself as a destination country for migrants that Western countries would like to remove.
It signed an agreement with Britain in 2022 to take in thousands of asylum seekers from the UK before the deal was scrapped last year by then newly-elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
After his arrest in 2018 following murder charges in Iraq, Ameen’s case was cited by the first Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress as an example of security risks posed by refugees and an argument against resettling them in the U.S.
A U.S. magistrate judge refused to allow his extradition to Iraq in 2021, saying there was overwhelming evidence Ameen was living as a refugee in Turkey at the time of the alleged murder, but the U.S. government continued to push for his deportation to a third country.
Human Rights Watch said in 2021 that his treatment showed “a system of arbitrary detention and cruel enforcement.”
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk in Washington DC and Aaron Ross in Nairobi; Additional reporting Philbert Girinema in Kigali; Editing by Aidan Lewis)
