Bernard Goah came to the United States to escape the violent civil wars that turned Liberia into hell on earth. In the 1990s and early 2000s, approximately 250,000 people died at the hands of Liberian rebel fighters, some of them child soldiers. Acts of rape, torture, and cannibalism were committed with impunity. Goah fled Liberia to escape the perpetrators of those acts, but he says several of them live freely and comfortably in the United States.
The federal government celebrated the high-profile deportation of Liberian warlord George Boley Sr. from New York in 2012 and the 2014 arrest of Jucontee Thomas Woewiyu, a former Liberian defense minister found living quietly in Pennsylvania. Those cases may have been the tip of the iceberg: According to a former special agent for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and several Liberian men — including Goah — who helped to bring Boley down, many more Liberian warlords, foot soldiers, and human-rights violators now live in the U.S. These war criminals appear to have hidden themselves in plain sight, using nonprofit organizations to help conceal their identities.