“They’re actually human beings, like us”

The Trump administration is deporting two Iranian women — already granted legal protection by a US court — to one of the most dangerous countries on earth.

Last week, feminists and humanists worldwide mourned the death of Marjane Satrapi, the author of the graphic novel Persepolis, who was also a director, artist, and exile from Iran. Satrapi told the Guardian in 2024 that “Persepolis was about making western readers reflect on the humanity of Iranian people, and to realise: ‘Oh, they’re actually human beings like us.’”

Today, I’ve been stunned by the news that the Trump administration is going to deport two Iranian women to the Central African Republic—a country so dangerous that the US State Department advises its own citizens not to travel there for any reason. They’re being deported for doing what Trump suggested they do last January—rise up against their government. And both fled the country to avoid persecution.

One of the women converted to Christianity. Under the Islamic Republic, apostasy is not a personal choice, but a crime, and can carry the death penalty. She sought asylum, and arrived in the US asking for protection. The US said yes, you qualify.

Another organized for democracy. Iran has spent the last several years killing people for that. The protests that swept the country, in which thousands were killed or detained by the regime, were driven by women like her. Women whose bravery we can’t even imagine. She, too, arrived in the US seeking asylum.

Both arrived in the United States in November 2024 and did everything the system asked of them: applied for asylum, went through the legal process, and won. A US court granted them withholding of removal — a specific legal protection that says, formally and on the record, that returning them to Iran would put them at risk of torture or persecution.

So now the administration found a workaround. It’s not sending them to Iran. It’s sending them to the Central African Republic, a country racked by civil war, militia violence, and some of the highest rates of gender-based violence on earth. A country they have never been to, have no connection to, and where they will have no support system, no legal standing, and no protection. Technically, this does not violate the court order. Technically, they are not being returned to the country that wants to imprison or kill them.

The facts, as reported by Reuters, are not in dispute. What is in dispute — what this administration is betting you won’t notice — is whether packaging it as a third-country deportation deal makes it something other than what it is:

Cruelty, another kind of death sentence.

It doesn’t.

To the administration, this is just a way to fix a problem with a technicality. The evil workaround is this: If you can’t legally deport someone to their home country, find a third country willing to take them instead. The court order says nothing about the Central African Republic, nor aboutthe DRC, which the administration has also been using as a dumping ground, and which is currently managing an Ebola outbreak. The order just says: not Iran. So: not Iran.

For the administration, what this requires, is a willing partner. The Central African Republic recently signed a deal to accept what officials are calling “third-country deportees” from the United States. The details of that deal are, according to rights groups and advocates, almost entirely opaque. What we know is that the CAR gets something — almost certainly money, almost certainly US favor — and in return it accepts people the United States has decided it no longer wants but cannot legally discard through normal channels. The countries are like Mafia hit men, being paid to make the problem go away.

The US State Department’s travel advisory for the Central African Republic reads: “Do not travel for any reason.” Level 4. The highest warning it issues. Reserved for active war zones and countries in acute crisis. Yet the administration is sending two women who fled persecution to a Level 4 country. And it is doing so having already been told by a US court that their lives are at risk.

This is so misogynistic it makes smoke come out of your head. The people making these decisions have constructed a system in which women — specifically women who have exercised agency, defied patriarchal authority, and survived to tell about it — are the ones who fall through the cracks. By design.

Look at who this deportation regime catches.

Christian converts in Iran are disproportionately women. Pro-democracy activists who fled the 2022 and 2025 uprisings are disproportionately women. LGBTQ Iranians facing a death sentence — a category Representatives Ansari and Min specifically named when they condemned earlier deportation flights — are people whose existence defies the gender and sexual order that authoritarian regimes depend on to function. These are people who made themselves targets by refusing to comply with systems built to control them. And now a different system, built by different men with different justifications, is finishing the job.

This administration has dismantled reproductive rights. It has gutted Title IX. It has eliminated DEI programs that disproportionately protected women in workplaces and universities. It has defunded international aid programs that provided healthcare and legal protection to women in conflict zones. It has, at every turn, made the same calculation: women’s safety is a cost we are not willing to bear. Women’s autonomy is a threat we are not willing to tolerate.

The deportation of these two women to the Central African Republic is not a departure from that pattern. It is a continuation of it, carried out on an international stage, with higher stakes and less visibility.

This administration has, at every turn, made the same calculation: women’s safety is a cost we are not willing to bear. Women’s autonomy is a threat we are not willing to tolerate.

The Central African Republic, where these women are being sent, is a country where gender-based violence is not an aberration but a feature of the conflict. Where armed groups have used rape systematically as a tool of war. Where women who are displaced, isolated, without community or legal recourse, are extraordinarily vulnerable. The administration is not sending these women somewhere neutral. It is sending them somewhere that will punish them specifically for being women without protection. That is not an accident of geography. That is a choice.

And underneath all of it runs a logic this administration has never bothered to disguise: that some women are worth protecting and some are not. That the right kind of woman — the one who looks right, comes from the right place, belongs to the right community — deserves safety. And that women who are Iranian, Muslim by birth, foreign, inconvenient, legally complicated — not to mention LGBT women, Black women and other women of color—those women are on their own.

But the flight has not happened yet. Legal challenges are possible. Attention matters. Call your representatives. Make noise. Tell people what is happening. Not the abstract version — not “the administration is deporting migrants.” The specific version: two women, one a Christian convert, one a pro-democracy activist, both already protected by a US court. Both being sent to a Level 4 country because this administration found a way to do it that doesn’t technically violate the law.

Essentially, being sending them to their deaths.