Barbara, a young woman from Tigray, Ethiopia, fled her country's civil war and traveled through Brazil before crossing into the US, where she was detained by border police and sent to an immigration detention center in Louisiana. A judge granted her withholding of removal, a protection barring deportation to her home country, but months later she was abruptly put on a flight and deported to Cameroon on April 28, 2026. As of September 2026, she remains at a government-run migrant shelter in Yaoundé alongside about 20 other deportees from nearly a dozen African countries, saying she has no family there and struggles because most residents speak French while she speaks English. She hopes to seek asylum in Cameroon rather than return to Ethiopia.