There is a woman who lived in Maryland for thirty years. She came from Sierra Leone. She built a life here. She went to her ICE check-in appointment in July 2025 as required, the kind of routine compliance that law-abiding immigrants perform because it is the right thing to do. She was detained at that appointment. Then she was put on a plane to Ghana. Then, despite a court order that said she could not be sent back to Sierra Leone because of the danger it posed to her life, Ghanaian officials forcibly repatriated her there anyway.
NBC Washington reported on video of the woman being dragged by officials in Ghana who were forcibly repatriating her to Sierra Leone. An immigration judge had granted an order saying she could not be sent back to Sierra Leone. However, her lawyer states that she was not provided with the opportunity to seek relief from deportation to a third country.
Thirty years in Maryland. A court order protecting her. Gone in a single afternoon.
This is not an isolated case. Across Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, the African immigrant community is living through the most aggressive immigration enforcement it has ever experienced in this country. The numbers behind that enforcement surge are staggering, the human cost is real and growing, and the DMV is directly in the center of it.
The Numbers Behind the Surge
African migrants in the United States are being arrested and deported at rapidly escalating rates under President Donald Trump’s second term, even though most have no criminal record. Deportations of people from African countries are on pace to nearly triple compared with the annual average during the Biden administration, according to a Capital B analysis of government data provided by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Likewise, the immigration-related arrests of African-born migrants have more than doubled, despite less than 40 percent of those arrested having a criminal record.
The national picture is alarming. The DMV picture is even more so.
ICE arrests in Maryland jumped 290 percent year-over-year, while Virginia experienced a staggering 470 percent increase, according to WUSA9’s analysis of ICE data from the Deportation Data Project. Washington D.C. also experienced rising numbers, though not to the dramatic extent seen in Maryland and Virginia. The surge reflects a policy change requiring ICE agents to arrest and deport people without criminal histories, a departure from previous enforcement priorities that focused primarily on individuals with serious criminal records.
In Maryland, 55 percent of immigration arrests involved people without criminal records. In Virginia, that figure reached 61 percent.
All told, ICE had arrested 3,308 people in Maryland from January 1 to October 15, 2025, the last date for which the Deportation Data Project provided numbers. That compares to 1,353 for all of 2024 and 387 for the last four months of 2023.
More than three thousand people in Maryland in less than ten months. Most of them without criminal records. The enforcement machinery that built this number did not distinguish between Salvadoran construction workers and Nigerian nurses. It swept through communities, workplaces, homes, and ICE check-in appointments without regard for who had been here for three years or who had been here for thirty.
How the Tactics Changed
The scale of arrests is one part of the story. How those arrests are happening is another, and for the DMV African community, the shift in tactics matters as much as the numbers.
The number of deportations within the United States increased by a factor of five over the course of the first year of the second Trump administration. ICE arrests more than quadrupled. ICE street arrests, meaning arrests not at jails but in neighborhoods, workplaces, immigration courts, and ICE field offices during regular check-ins, went up by a factor of eleven.
That eleven-fold increase in street arrests is the detail that changed daily life for African immigrant families across the DMV. When enforcement happened primarily at jails and during border processing, communities had a degree of predictability about who was at risk. When enforcement moved into the streets, the morning commute, the school run, the ICE check-in appointment, and the workplace became potential sites of arrest for anyone without documentation regardless of community ties, criminal history, or pending legal proceedings.
Community leaders say this shift has created what they describe as a chilling fear factor that is fundamentally altering daily life in immigrant communities across the region. Abel Nuñez, executive director of CARECEN DC, said the current approach differs significantly from previous administrations in both scope and public visibility. During this administration, he explained, they go to a location looking for one individual that has an order of deportation, but anybody that cannot prove they are here legally will get arrested and then put into deportation proceedings.
Nuñez said the fear is having broader public health and economic consequences. His clients are avoiding medical appointments and keeping children home from school. When someone is sick, he explained, we are all in a social system, so if you are sick, you can get me sick. But if you have the ability to go to the hospital, to go to a clinic, to go to your doctor and address those illnesses, then everybody is safer.
The public health dimension is not theoretical. Across PG County and Montgomery County, the African immigrant community, which includes a disproportionate number of healthcare workers, patients, and caregivers, is now navigating a healthcare system while afraid to access it.
Black Immigrants Face Disproportionate Risk
The enforcement surge has not fallen evenly across immigrant communities, and the data on how it specifically affects Black immigrants, which in the DMV context means primarily African and Afro-Caribbean communities, tells a troubling story.
Black migrants in the United States face unique and disproportionate risks under current immigration enforcement policies. Studies have shown that Black immigrants are deported on criminal grounds at a rate roughly four times higher than their overall presence in the undocumented population would predict. They also experience elevated rates of arrest and solitary confinement while in ICE custody. One analysis found nearly a quarter of people held in solitary confinement were Black, even though Black migrants make up less than four percent of ICE detainees.
The American Immigration Council has documented that more than one out of three people deported from detention in 2025 had no criminal record at all, neither pending criminal charges nor any prior criminal conviction. Just two percent of those deported from detention in 2025 were tagged as suspected gang members in ICE data, and just 0.4 percent were tagged as known or suspected terrorists, despite the Trump administration having designated Tren de Aragua, MS-13, and other transnational criminal organizations as terrorist groups.
The administration’s public messaging has consistently emphasized the removal of criminals and dangerous individuals. The data consistently tells a different story. The communities being swept up in this enforcement surge are not primarily composed of people with criminal records. They are composed of people whose primary offense is their immigration status, and within that group, Black immigrants are being pulled into the deportation system at rates that cannot be explained by their share of the undocumented population alone.
Maryland’s Courts Are Under Strain
The surge in arrests has not been matched by a corresponding investment in the legal infrastructure that is supposed to protect due process for those detained. The result is an immigration court system in the DMV that advocates describe as dangerously dysfunctional.
Immigration attorney Messer said there has been a bloodbath of immigration court judges due to actions by the Board of Immigration Appeals and US Attorney General Pam Bondi. Judges who have previously represented immigrants or worked at pro-immigrant organizations have been fired, he said, with some of them being replaced by military lawyers. We have a few of these temporary immigration judges now in our area, the DMV, and they have supposedly gotten a crash course in immigration law, but none of them have any experience in it.
Messer noted the Board of Immigration Appeals and Bondi’s decision to overturn decades of practice and precedent by determining that anyone who came to the United States without a visa does not have bond eligibility, a decision which many federal courts have rejected, as one of the new challenges.
The practical effect is that African immigrants detained in Maryland face hearings before inexperienced judges operating under new rules that eliminate bail for large categories of detainees, meaning people who would previously have been released while their cases were processed are now held in detention facilities, often in other states, sometimes for months.
In the past, people without criminal convictions were often released from detention on bond. That changed in 2025. Release within 60 days of arrest, common for people without criminal convictions in the last six months of the Biden administration at 35 percent, became rare at seven percent. The rate of deportation within two months of arrest doubled for this group, from 27 percent to 57 percent. Perhaps because of the lower release rate, many more people chose to give up on their cases, with voluntary departures and returns increasing by 28 times.
That 28-fold increase in voluntary departures is one of the most consequential statistics in this entire story. It means that a significant share of the African immigrants leaving the United States are not being formally deported after a hearing. They are choosing to leave rather than face indefinite detention without bond while waiting for a hearing before an inexperienced judge under rules that have been rejected by multiple federal courts. They are leaving the country of their own accord because the system has made fighting to stay too dangerous and too costly.
The Third-Country Deportation System: What It Means for West Africans in the DMV
Beyond the direct deportation of African immigrants to their home countries, the Trump administration has developed a parallel system that has particular consequences for West African communities in the DMV: third-country deportations.
The Trump administration struck largely secretive agreements with at least five African nations, including Eswatini, Rwanda, Ghana, Uganda, and South Sudan, to take migrants under a new third-country deportation program. These are individuals being sent not to their countries of origin, but to countries they have never lived in and have no ties to.
The Ghana agreement is the one with the most direct impact on the DMV’s West African community. The United States and Ghana signed an agreement for Ghana to accept third-country nationals deported by the US. Ghanaian President John Mahama stated that Ghana would take in nationals from various West African countries. The 14 men who arrived on September 4, 2025, under this arrangement included 13 Nigerians and one Gambian. None of them were originally from Ghana. Court documents show they were awoken in the middle of the night on September 5 and not told where they were going until hours into the flight on a US military cargo plane.
The legal protections that should have prevented this from happening were bypassed. Some of the deportees had received a legal protection called withholding of removal, a ruling by an immigration judge that they face a clear probability of persecution or torture in their home countries. US and international law prohibit the government from returning individuals to places where their life or freedom would be threatened. But under these third-country deals, migrants were removed from the United States to nations where they had neither ties nor adequate legal protections.
Maureen A. Sweeney, immigration lawyer and professor of law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, said sending the deportees to their countries despite legal orders prohibiting such actions over fear of their safety is a clear violation of the duties both countries have to protect the migrants. This is part of a pattern by the US government of extreme indifference, at least, to the government’s obligations and to the human consequences of its mass deportation campaign, she said.
When a law professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law uses the phrase extreme indifference to describe the treatment of African deportees, it is worth pausing to understand what that means for families in Prince George’s County whose relatives attended their ICE check-ins, followed the rules, and ended up in a military camp in Ghana with no running water, no bedding, and no legal representation.
One of the deported women attempted suicide and was hospitalized. The risk of being removed back to her own country was too much for her, according to her attorney. Within days, she was transferred from the camp, taken to the airport, and put on a flight back to her country of origin, the country the court had said she could not safely be returned to.
The Self-Deportation Pressure
Beyond formal deportations and third-country transfers, there is a third category of departure that the data cannot fully capture: people who are leaving because they feel they have no choice.
William Yirenkyi self-deported himself back to Ghana after struggling to establish a life in the United States following the policy shifts under the Trump administration. His story, documented by Capital B News, is representative of a pattern playing out across the DMV and the country. African immigrants who entered the United States legally, built lives, held jobs, raised children, and paid taxes are making the calculation that the legal and psychological cost of staying has become greater than the cost of leaving.
ICE deported 442,637 people between October 2024 and September 2025, about 171,000 more than the fiscal year before. The homeland security department’s much-hyped self-deportation figure is not included in that report. The actual number of people who left the United States under enforcement pressure is substantially higher than what the formal deportation statistics show.
For the DMV African community, self-deportation is not an abstraction. It is the Nigerian engineer who packed up his Bowie apartment in February. The Cameroonian nurse who transferred her Maryland nursing license to a Canadian province and left in March. The Eritrean family who sold their Hyattsville home at a loss because the uncertainty was no longer livable.
What This Means for PG County and Montgomery County
Prince George’s County and Montgomery County are home to two of the top five African immigrant communities in the entire United States. The enforcement surge is hitting those communities with particular force, and the consequences extend beyond the individuals directly arrested.
Maryland saw more than five times as many community arrests in May 2025 compared to the same period the previous year. Virginia experienced a fifteen-fold increase. Community leaders say the shift has created a chilling fear factor that is fundamentally altering daily life in immigrant communities across the region.
When parents are afraid to drive to work because ICE vehicles were seen in a neighborhood the previous morning, their children may not get to school. When the Nigerian-owned restaurant in Hyattsville loses its dishwasher to an ICE raid, it may close early that week. When the Cameroonian home health aide in Silver Spring is afraid to take public transit for her morning shift, the elderly American patient she cares for may not receive their medication on time.
The enforcement surge does not stay in the immigrant community. It radiates outward into the economy, the healthcare system, the schools, and the tax base of the counties where African immigrants have been building lives and contributing for six decades.
ICE made ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, funded at a level higher than some foreign militaries, following the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by President Trump on July 4, 2025, which provided $170.1 billion in new spending for immigration enforcement. That funding level signals that what the DMV African community is experiencing now is not a temporary surge. It is the new baseline.
What the DMV African Community Needs to Know Right Now
For African immigrants in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C., several practical realities have changed under the current enforcement environment.
If you have a valid green card or visa, you are not currently subject to deportation proceedings. Carry your documents with you at all times. If you are stopped by ICE, you have the right to remain silent and the right to speak to an attorney before answering questions.
If you have a pending immigration case or an ICE check-in appointment, consult an immigration attorney before attending. The practice of attending check-ins has become legally more complicated because check-ins are now being used as arrest opportunities for people who previously attended them without incident.
If you are a US citizen whose family member is detained, contact an immigration attorney immediately. The new bond eligibility rules mean that people who would previously have been released while their cases were processed are now being held, sometimes in facilities outside Maryland. An attorney can file for a bond hearing and begin the process of identifying which facility the detained person is in.
If you are from a country subject to the third-country deportation agreements, including Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia, and other West African nations, specifically discuss third-country removal risk with your attorney. Court orders of withholding of removal have been violated in documented cases. Knowing your legal status and protections in writing, and having an attorney who can respond quickly, is more important now than at any previous point.
Organizations Providing Help in the DMV
African Communities Together, DC, Maryland, and Virginia Chapter, advocates specifically for African immigrants facing immigration enforcement and can connect community members with legal resources.
CARECEN DC provides immigration legal services to the immigrant community across the region and has been actively tracking ICE enforcement patterns in Maryland and Virginia.
The University of Maryland Carey School of Law Immigration Clinic represents detained immigrants in Maryland and has been directly involved in challenging third-country deportation orders.
CASA Maryland provides legal aid, emergency assistance, and community organizing support for immigrants across the state.
The National Immigrant Justice Center provides immigration legal services and has been involved in litigation challenging the enforcement practices documented in this article.
If you witness an ICE enforcement action, you can report it to the DMV Immigration Hotline and to your local council member’s office. Documentation of enforcement patterns helps advocates identify legal challenges and protect community members.
The Larger Picture
The deportation surge hitting the DMV African community is part of the largest immigration enforcement expansion in American history, and it is being directed with particular intensity at Black immigrant communities that the data show were already facing disproportionate enforcement before the current administration took office.
The African immigrant community in Maryland and Virginia built what it has over six decades of chain migration, family reunification, educational excellence, professional achievement, and community investment. It built the African grocery stores on Landover Road and the restaurants on Georgia Avenue. It built the nursing workforce in PG County hospitals and the braiding salons in Hyattsville. It built the churches and the cultural associations and the mutual aid networks.
All of that infrastructure was built by people who came here legally, worked within the system, and trusted that the system would protect them. The woman from Sierra Leone who went to her ICE check-in appointment trusted that. She was dragged onto a military cargo plane and deposited in a country she had never lived in, in violation of a court order, with no legal recourse available before it happened.
That is where the DMV African community is in May 2026. And the community deserves to know it, in full.