Six people deported by the United States to Liberia were flown to Equatorial Guinea after they refused to get off the plane, turning what had been described to them as a return to the United States into a second transfer across borders. The group includes four Cuban men, a Brazilian man and a Cameroonian woman, and they are now being held in Malabo.
The move matters because it capped a strange route that began last week when a U.S. deportation flight landed at Roberts International Airport outside Monrovia. A Honduran deportee aboard the flight said the six stayed on board because Liberia was not their country and they believed they would face danger there. The other passengers got off, fearing officers would force them to leave, but the six were separated from the rest after refusing to disembark.
By Monday, a person on the plane and a lawyer in contact with the six said they had been sent to Equatorial Guinea. Meredyth Yoon said they were told they would be returned to the United States, but instead were flown to Malabo city and arrived there on Thursday in what she called a heartbreaking and chaotic scene. She said some arrived in chains and in extreme distress. One of the Cuban men, she said, has a large abdominal growth and uses a colostomy bag that must be drained regularly.
Their situation in Equatorial Guinea is stark. Yoon said there is no medical staff at the hotel where they are being kept, even though around 40 other deported migrants are also being held there. She said food is sometimes withheld and guards have been accused of threatening, beating and choking some of the migrants.
The unanswered question is why the six were routed to Equatorial Guinea at all after refusing to disembark in Liberia, and what happens to them next. The Trump administration has deported thousands of people to two dozen countries that are not their own under a series of often secret agreements, and immigration lawyers say the practice is being used as a legal loophole to indirectly return some asylum seekers to countries they fled. Equatorial Guinea signed one of those third-country deportation agreements.
