United States paid Equatorial Guinea $7.5 million to accept deportees with US protections

The United States and Equatorial Guinea signed a Note Verbale dated October 2, 2025, which the State Department later made publicly available on its website, under which the U.S. paid Equatorial Guinea $7.5 million — a sum Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Jeanne Shaheen called "highly unusual" and larger than total US foreign assistance to the country over the prior eight years — to accept deportees who could not be returned to their own countries. The first flight under the agreement arrived November 24, 2025; three more followed on January 22, April 29, and June 18, 2026, bringing the total to at least 40 people forcibly transferred, most of whom had previously been granted U.S. humanitarian protections against removal to their home countries. Litigation director Meredyth Yoon of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, who has assisted deportees to Equatorial Guinea, said the third-country route is used "to circumvent laws that forbid sending a person to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened."

2026-03-21 — AP investigation revealed the secretive deal and a deportee's account of ICE force

An Associated Press investigation revealed the arrangement publicly for the first time, reporting that deportees were held in a converted hotel in Malabo, the former capital. Among them, a 28-year-old East African refugee told AP he was granted protection under U.S. law and the UN Convention Against Torture after 13 months in detention, only to be pressured by ICE agents to sign a voluntary-return document; when he refused, he said, "these ICE officers started using force, they started beating me." He was then transferred between detention facilities in Arizona, California, Texas, and Louisiana before being deported to Equatorial Guinea in January on a charter flight operated by Omni Air International. A DHS spokesperson told AP that ICE officers "did NOT beat, coerce, or use racial slurs" against him and said all deportees to Equatorial Guinea "received due process and had a final order of removal." The arrangement is part of a broader pattern: the Trump administration has spent at least $40 million to deport roughly 300 migrants to countries other than their own, per a February 2026 Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democratic staff report, with other African nations signing similar deals including South Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and Cameroon.

2026-06-05 — Coalition sued Equatorial Guinea before African rights commission

A coalition of human rights groups — including Asian Americans Advancing Justice, EG Justice, and the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa — filed suit on behalf of 14 Equatorial Guinea deportees before the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, seeking precautionary measures to halt further transfers after six of the 14 had already been forcibly returned to countries they had fled despite fearing persecution or torture.

2026-07-09 — Coalition warned of medical neglect, Ebola risk at EG detention hotel

A coalition including the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa, the Pan African Lawyers Union, EG Justice, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta said detained deportees at the Malabo hotel were being denied adequate medical care and that a suspected Ebola patient was brought into the same facility under quarantine without protective supplies provided to detainees, according to the Associated Press.