Deportees who refused Liberia flight sent to Equatorial Guinea

Six people who were deported by the United States to Liberia last week resisted getting off the plane and instead were sent to Equatorial Guinea, another ‌African nation that signed a third-country deportation agreement with the Trump administration, a person on the plane and a lawyer in contact with the six said on Monday.

Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to two dozen countries that aren’t their own as it pushes ahead with its immigration crackdown, advocates say. Immigration lawyers say the practice is being used as a legal loophole to indirectly return some asylum seekers to countries they fled.

The group who refused to get off the plane in Liberia on Thursday include four Cuban men, a Brazilian man and a Cameroonian woman, the person and lawyer said.

A Honduran deportee aboard the flight said the group refused to disembark, saying Liberia was “not their country” and that they would face danger there. They were then separated from the others, he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals.

He said the other passengers got off in Liberia because they feared officers would force them.

Meredyth Yoon, litigation director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, said the deportees who resisted leaving the plane in Liberia were told they would be returned to the United States but instead were flown to Malabo city in Equatorial Guinea.

“It was a really heartbreaking and chaotic scene when they arrived in Malabo on Thursday,” Yoon said.

Some arrived in chains and in extreme distress, she said, including the Cameroonian woman and one of the Cuban men, who Yoon said has a large abdominal growth and uses a colostomy bag that must be drained regularly.

There is no medical staff at the hotel in Equatorial Guinea where the six are being held, alongside around 40 other deported migrants, she added.

Conditions at the hotel have worsened in recent months, Yoon said, with food sometimes withheld and guards accused of threatening, beating and choking some of the migrants.

Equatorial Guinea’s government did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment.

Under an opaque US$7.5-million deal with the Trump administration, Equatorial Guinea’s all-powerful president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has turned the hotel owned by his family into a prison for asylum seekers deported from the US.