Ali didn’t know the U.S. government was deporting him to Yemen until the plane that officials put him on landed in Egypt in June. 

He begged to be allowed to stay in Egypt instead of boarding the additional flight back to the homeland from which he had fled. But officials insisted that he board the plane.

Prism is using pseudonyms for Ali and his family members due to safety concerns.

Before he left Egypt, Ali managed to call his brother Hakim, who was granted asylum in the U.S. in 2020. 

“I told him, ‘Stay there. Don’t go back,’” Hakim recalled. “He said, ‘They [immigration officials] don’t let me.’”

After Ali arrived in Yemen, Hakim said his brother was quickly imprisoned by the Houthi militia, an extremist group that has been labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. After about a month, Ali managed to escape by tricking his captors, but that likely means that if they find him again, they will kill him, Hakim explained. 

“I’m not OK. I’m scared. I’m in my country. I don’t feel safe,” Ali said in Arabic in a written response to Prism’s questions sent through his family members, who have only occasionally been able to communicate with him since his escape. “I’m hiding, and I’m afraid they’ll find me.”

Under U.S. and international law, migrants are not supposed to be sent to countries where they are likely to be persecuted or tortured. But after policy changes from the Trump administration, the U.S. government sent Ali to Yemen anyway.

“Your country is not dangerous for you” 

On President Donald Trump’s first day in office during his second term, he suspended the ability of all immigrants to apply for asylum. 

His administration created an opaque process that allowed migrants to apply only for a lesser form of protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, known as the Convention Against Torture (CAT), and the administration made it more complicated than before for migrants to prove that they qualify. The change meant that those who weren’t able to successfully show over a phone call with an asylum officer that they were more likely than not to be tortured by their government were ordered deported, including Ali.

According to Hakim, an ICE officer told Ali that his country is “not dangerous.”

“They don’t care about the human life,” Hakim said.

In July, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., blocked the Trump administration’s changes from affecting newly arriving asylum-seekers, but the judge did not order any remedy for the people already deported. An appeals court later stayed part of the judge’s order.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

To understand the situation in Yemen, Riad al Khouri, an independent country of information expert specializing in North Africa and West Asia, said it is important to note that the country is one of the poorest in the world and that northern Yemen and southern Yemen had different experiences during colonization.

“The north was really never truly dominated by a foreign power,” al Khouri said. “The south, on the other hand, was under the British for many years, and the main city in the south, Aden, was at one point in the 19th century the second busiest port in the world after London.”

The two regions unified in the 1990s, he said, and then fell into a civil war during which the north had to conquer the south to keep the country as one.

According to Hakim, life for his family in northern Yemen was good until about 2011.

“Now, life there is very, very dangerous,” Hakim said.

In 2011, after protests against government leaders grew in Tunisia and Egypt as part of the Arab Spring, people in Yemen began protesting as well. They ousted President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom the Washington Post referred to as a dictator. 

President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who previously served as vice president, replaced Saleh. In 2014, the Houthis took over northern Yemen.

Hadi resigned and fled the Houthis’ advances in 2015, and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states began waging war in Yemen to push back the Houthis, with support from the U.S. 

Saleh made an alliance with the Houthis but later publicly broke ties with them in 2017 to begin a dialogue with the Saudi-led coalition. He was killed days later. 

“There are no lasting alliances. The alliances shift and move constantly among Yemenis themselves,” Shireen Al-Adeimi, a professor at Michigan State University who was born in Yemen, told Current Affairs on a podcast in 2021.

Hakim said he was an office worker for Saleh, and when Saleh was killed, the Houthis rounded up the people who worked for him. Hakim ended up in jail, he said, where he saw people killed and tortured. 

“They cut fingers, pull nails out. They use electric shock,” he recalled.

He also said the Houthis force many young men to join them.

“They give you a gun and say, ‘Go fight,’” Hakim said. “If you don’t, they kill you or put you in jail.”

Hakim spent more than four months in jail, he said. Hakim’s father paid a general to help his son escape to southern Yemen, where Hakim managed to get a passport. He went through Egypt to Turkey and then Ecuador. In 2020, he made it to the U.S.-Mexico border, where he requested asylum.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) held Hakim at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, California. Southern California Immigration Project, run by attorney Elizabeth Lopez, specializes in asylum cases from African countries for people detained there. Hakim’s was her first case from Yemen, Lopez said.

With Lopez’s help, Hakim won his case. He soon brought his wife and children to safety, and the family resettled in New Mexico.

Hakim’s brother Ali had a decidedly different experience with the U.S. asylum system. 

Fleeing to the U.S.

Ali worked as a mechanic in northern Yemen, and his boss also had a shop in Saudi Arabia, according to Hakim. After a car bomb detonated in a Houthi vehicle, the militia arrested all of the workers at the shop, including Ali.

Ali escaped the jail and fled to Egypt around August 2024. From there, he flew to Brazil, Ali said.

He passed through Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama—including its dangerous jungle in the Darién Gap, Ali told Prism. He said he then continued through Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala to Mexico, where he was tortured. 

“They detained me, beat me, and threatened me,” Ali told Prism. It was not clear from his answers which group was responsible.

Lopez said Hakim called her while Ali was making the journey north. 

“I said, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do until he’s here,” Lopez said. 

Regardless of where they cross, people requesting asylum can end up detained anywhere in the U.S. while they await the outcome of their cases. This meant that Lopez had to see if Ali would be sent to either Imperial Regional Detention Facility or Otay Mesa Detention Center, the two facilities where her organization handles cases.

Around February, Ali managed to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. 

“Upon arriving in the U.S., I felt safe and relieved of the fear that had crept inside me,” Ali wrote. “I thought I would live the rest of my life in peace.”

Trump wasn’t in office when Ali left Yemen, but by the time he arrived in the U.S., the current president’s policies were in full effect.

Ali, like his brother, ended up at Imperial Regional Detention Facility, where Lopez took his case.

Ali called the detention center “frightening” and said officials treated immigrants detained there badly. In 2022, five men detained at the facility filed a federal complaint alleging medical negligence, retaliatory use of solitary confinement, and civil rights violations, KPBS reported.  

Lopez met Ali this year on Feb. 14. She didn’t yet know what effects to expect from the changes that Trump made.

“I was pretty confident that he was going to get credible fear granted because what had happened to him was pretty horrendous,” Lopez recalled.

U.S. immigration law includes three kinds of protection for people fleeing their countries: asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture. Asylum is the only one of the three that leads to a green card and potential citizenship.

While the first step in the asylum process is the credible fear interview, the equivalent step for withholding and CAT protections is the reasonable fear interview, with slightly different criteria. 

Trump’s new CAT assessment, as the government called it, was different from—and much more difficult than—both of those interviews. 

Denied protection

Lopez didn’t find out that the government used the new CAT assessment on Ali until after he failed it in February of this year.

While the government is generally required to notify attorneys and include them in the screening calls for credible fear and reasonable fear, it did not include attorneys in the CAT assessment calls, Lopez said.

According to Ali, his interview took about an hour and a half. 

Lopez said the officer who interviewed Ali asserted the Houthis were not the government in Yemen and therefore, Ali didn’t face the risk of torture by his government.

“Obviously, whoever interviewed him did not know what was going on in Yemen and did not know that the Houthis are the proxy government in northern Yemen,” Lopez said.  

Unlike credible fear and reasonable fear interviews, the CAT assessment did not include any kind of judicial review for applicants to appeal. The officer’s decision was final, Lopez said.

Still, Lopez didn’t believe that the U.S. government would send Ali back to a country that its military had just bombed. That included the bombing that an editor with The Atlantic inadvertently learned about through a Signal chat.

“He’s going to get deported to a third country, but no way are they going to send him back to Yemen,” Lopez recalled thinking.

Then she heard from Hakim that ICE took his brother to Yemen in June.

“I freaked out,” Lopez said, characterizing the U.S. government’s decision to send Ali to Yemen as “shocking and appalling.” 

“Our country obviously knows what’s going on and how horrible it is,” she said. “It’s in violation of the Convention Against Torture. It’s refoulement, where you’re sending somebody back to a known horrific situation. You know that they’re going to be harmed one way or another. You can’t turn a blind eye to a country that we’re involved with active airstrikes.”

She consulted with other attorneys and searched for court cases that might help bring him back, but because he was already deported, there wasn’t much she could do.

As the attorney of record on Ali’s case, Lopez should have received notification prior to the deportation, no matter what country the U.S. government planned to send him to.

“They should’ve let me know, and they didn’t,” Lopez told Prism. 

Then she heard that the Houthis had again imprisoned Ali days after his arrival.

“I care about this family, and to know what happened, it just broke my heart,” Lopez said. “I felt so helpless.”

Not alone

Ali said ICE first transported him to a detention center in Texas for about a week before officers told him that he was being transferred elsewhere. The officers put him in shackles that bound his wrists, ankles, and waist.

Hakim said he couldn’t sleep at all the night in June when his brother called from Egypt in the middle of the deportation. 

“Anyone who comes now, they say only, ‘Deportation,’” Hakim lamented. “They don’t let you fight for yourself.” 

After the Houthis held Ali for about a month, Hakim said, they told him that he could leave the jail if he joined them. He agreed, and after they let him out, he escaped again. No one in his family knows his current location. 

Hakim told Prism that he has barely heard from his brother since he managed to escape in July. 

Hakim hopes that his brother will be able to flee Yemen again, but it’s not clear where he would go if he manages to get out. Although the policies in the U.S. have recently changed due to a court order, that could change again at any time as the case moves through appeals.

Lopez said Ali’s asylum case is a strong one, given that he was detained by the Houthis after returning to Yemen.

When she spoke to Hakim after Ali’s escape, Lopez said she suggested that Ali try for Spain because she’s heard that the country will receive people, but getting to Europe is a dangerous journey with its own complications. In recent years, thousands of people have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach safety.

Lopez said she wants the public to know Ali’s story so that his family wouldn’t feel alone.

“I don’t want them to feel like America doesn’t care,” Lopez said. “I want them to know that we’re not going to let this go unnoticed.”

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor