Deportees who refused to leave Liberia sent to Equatorial Guinea
Six people deported by the United States to Liberia last week resisted getting off the plane and were instead sent to Equatorial Guinea, another African nation that has signed a third-country deportation agreement with the Trump administration, a person on the plane and a lawyer in contact with the six said Monday.
Under a series of often secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to two dozen countries that are not their own as part of its immigration crackdown, according to advocates. Immigration lawyers say the practice is being used as a legal loophole to indirectly return some asylum seekers to countries they had fled.
The group that refused to disembark in Liberia on Thursday included four Cuban men, a Brazilian man and a Cameroonian woman, the person on the plane and the lawyer said.
A Honduran deportee aboard the flight, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals, said the group refused to get off because they said Liberia was "not their country" and that they would face danger there. He said the group was then separated from the other deportees, who disembarked in Liberia because they feared officers would force them off the plane.
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 were instead flown to Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea.
"It was a really heartbreaking and chaotic scene when they arrived in Malabo on Thursday," Yoon said.
She said some of the deportees arrived in chains and in extreme distress, 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.
Yoon said there is no medical staff at the hotel in Equatorial Guinea where the six are being held, along with around 40 other deported migrants. She said conditions at the hotel have worsened in recent months, 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 for comment.
Under an opaque USD 7.5 million deal with the Trump administration, Equatorial Guinea's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has turned a hotel owned by his family into a holding facility for asylum seekers deported from the US, according to the report.
(Sourced through PTI)
