KINSHASA, DR Congo (AFP) — Spending the past five days cooped up in a hotel in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo is not quite what a group of Latin Americans expected when they sought asylum in the United States.

But their predicament is far from the worst of it: the men and women told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Wednesday that they arrived in Kinshasa after a 27-hour flight which they spent with their hands and feet shackled.

Gabriela, a 30-year-old Colombian sporting tattoos and clad like most of her fellow sufferers in a white T-shirt, summed up their plight.

“I didn’t want to go to Congo. I’m scared, I don’t know the language,” she said.

She only found out where they were headed the day before being expelled from the US.

The DRC — one of a number of African nations that have agreed to take in deported migrants — is one of the world’s 15 poorest countries, thousands of kilometers from the Americas.

The first batch of deportees arrived last Friday in the central African country under a controversial US migration scheme to pack off undocumented foreign nationals to third countries.