Live updates: U.S. shoots down Iranian drones; Tehran says no final decision as Trump touts imminent deal

An Iranian woman is among around two dozens migrants set to arrive Friday in the Central African Republic on a deportation flight from the United States, lawyers said, in the latest example of the Trump administration’s widely criticized deals with African and Latin American nations to take third-country deportees,

The Central African Republic, a deeply impoverished country plagued by conflict, is one of at least nine other African nations that has agreed to take third-country nationals deported by the U.S. Under a series of often-secret agreements that are part of a broad U.S. crackdown on immigration, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to nearly two dozen countries that are not their own, advocates say.

It was unclear exactly how many migrants were on the deportation flight that left Louisiana late Thursday on the way to the Central African Republic’s capital Bangui. Among those set to be deported Thursday were people from Iran, Jordan, Armenia, Turkey, Georgia and Afghanistan, according to Ali Rahnama, the head of the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund, who has been in touch with some of the migrants.

Three Iranian women in the U.S. were originally scheduled to be sent to Central African Republic, according to Sahar Jalili Pawelski, one of their immigration lawyers, who said two of them received emergency court orders temporarily stopping their deportation while judges reviewed whether the government was acting legally.