I have spent nearly two decades documenting what the government of Equatorial Guinea does to dissidents and activists it wants to silence. I did not expect, this year, to be documenting what it does to people the United States sends there.
Equatorial Guinea is one of the most closed, corrupt, and repressive dictatorships in the world. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has ruled the country since seizing power in a 1979 coup, making him the world’s longest-serving current head of state. His government has no independent judiciary and a long record of arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing—documented not only by human rights organizations, but year after year by the U.S. State Department itself.
Late last year, the United States began sending deportees there anyway.
Not Equatoguinean nationals. People from Angola, Cameroon, Eritrea, and elsewhere across Africa, and now Cubans and a Brazilian—men and women with no ties to Equatorial Guinea, some of whom had already won legal protection from removal to their home countries in U.S. immigration proceedings, according to the Geneva-based monitoring group Global Detention Project. The United States deported them instead to a country many had never set foot in, under an arrangement the Trump administration struck with the government in Equatorial Guinea.
This past Sunday, two of the people detained there reached members of our legal team directly. Washington D.C.-based EG Justice, the organization I direct, and the Equatorial Guinean Commission of Jurists, a nongovernmental organization promoting rule of law in the country, are working alongside U.S. and African lawyers to represent these deportees and protect their rights. What these two detainees described to our team is not ordinary immigration detention. It is deliberate cruelty.
At least 66 “third-country nationals” have now been sent to Equatorial Guinea. Many have been held at Hotel Bamy in Malabo—the same hotel where authorities recently quarantined at least one person suspected of having Ebola.
Firsthand Accounts
One of the detainees managed to hide a phone after authorities confiscated most of the others. Through that phone, two detainees separately gave members of our legal team firsthand accounts of what they say happened there last week on the morning of Sept. 11 in a case that has since been covered in major news media. Security officers seized Ahmed Soliman, who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, after his family moved from Egypt when he was four years old, and a fellow detainee from Eritrea whose name we are withholding for his safety. Days earlier, on Sept. 5, a security officer had pointed a loaded weapon at Soliman during a confrontation over the confiscation of detainees’ phones.
Then, on Sept. 11, according to the witnesses who contacted us, officers bound Soliman and the other man with rope, placed bags over their heads, and beat them on the head, back, and ribs with elbows, knees, and gun barrels while demanding to know where their phones were. The men were forced down a staircase still bound and hooded. One was shoved down the stairs and then hauled back up by the rope tied around him as he screamed in pain.
One of the witnesses told our legal team it was the worst thing she had ever seen, and that she can’t get the image out of her mind. The other deportees still held at the hotel have been left wondering whether they will ever see those two men again.
One of the witnesses described another chilling encounter in late August. A military officer with a star on his uniform—whom the detainees believed to be a general—told her: “You will disappear from the earth. I am the law.” She told us she fears she will not wake up the next day.
These deportees are no strangers to violence. Many survived war, persecution, or sexual assault before seeking protection in the United States. Some live with chronic illnesses, including HIV. Others have serious mental-health conditions. They tell us they are not receiving the medications they need.
For someone living with a serious medical condition and deprived of necessary medication, being sent to that hotel is not a bureaucratic delay. It can become a matter of life and death—with no court, no hearing, and no meaningful recourse.
We repeatedly contacted the U.S. Embassy in Malabo about the alleged torture, the lack of medication, and the treatment of the deportees. They ignored our countless email communications, and when we reached them by phone, we were told there was nothing they could do because these individuals are not within U.S. jurisdiction.
U.S. Payment of $7.5 Million
But of course, these individuals did not arrive in Equatorial Guinea by accident. The U.S. government expelled them and transported them there, at U.S. taxpayer expense. The United States also paid Equatorial Guinea $7.5 million to accept third-country deportees.
That payment has itself drawn scrutiny in Washington. U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the payment “highly unusual” and asked the State Department to explain how transferring $7.5 million directly to the government of Equatorial Guinea was a permissible use of money Congress appropriated for migration and refugee assistance.
In an Oct. 2, 2025 note verbale (an informal, third-person note) apparently published by the State Department in June, the government of Equatorial Guinea gave its own written assurance: it would treat every transferred deportee “in a manner consistent with its international legal obligations,” and none of them would be subjected to “persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, or to torture in Equatorial Guinea or in any other country to which the Government of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea may subsequently transfer them.”
Clearly that pledge has been broken. A bound, hooded man beaten with gun barrels while officers demanded his phone is the exact violation the government of Equatorial Guinea put its name to preventing. Nor is his case isolated. Of the first 29 people deported to Equatorial Guinea, at least 17 have already been sent back to the very countries to which U.S. courts had ruled they could not safely be returned, a pattern that United Nations human rights experts have called an imminent risk of refoulement.
Ignoring Years of U.S. Condemnation of Equatorial Guinea’s Regime
The U.S. deal to pay Equatorial Guinea to accept U.S. deportees from third countries followed a visit to Washington by Equatorial Guinea’s vice president, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, to meet with senior U.S. officials. That had required the State Department to temporarily waive U.S. visa restrictions for an official who, in 2014, had agreed to relinquish more than $30 million in assets—including a Malibu mansion, a Ferrari, and Michael Jackson memorabilia—to settle U.S. Justice Department civil-forfeiture cases involving assets allegedly purchased with the proceeds of corruption. At the time, the Justice Department said Nguema Obiang had “shamelessly looted his government and shook down businesses in his country to support his lavish lifestyle, while many of his fellow citizens lived in extreme poverty,” and that he did so through “relentless embezzlement and extortion.”
So when he met with Trump administration officials last year to make these deals, they knew exactly who they were dealing with. Since the first Trump administration, Equatoguineans have watched Washington claim to champion democracy and human rights while maintaining a relationship with a government its own reports repeatedly condemn for serious abuses. It is a contradiction many of my countrymen have grown bitterly accustomed to.
But there is something different about what is happening now. The United States is not merely overlooking abuses committed against Equatoguineans. It is deliberately sending people into the custody of a government whose record it knows is abusive and that it once condemned, paying that government millions of dollars to receive them, and then asserting that its responsibility ends once those people are outside U.S. custody.
I have spent much of my career asking the United States to hold Equatorial Guinea accountable to the values America says it represents: the rule of law, due process, and human dignity.
Today, I am asking something harder. I am asking the United States to hold itself accountable to those same values.
These deportees are human beings. And when a government deliberately transfers people into the custody of a regime whose record of torture it has spent decades condemning, it does not get to look away from what happens next.
