Deportees say ICE agents assaulted, restrained, and denied them medical care and bathroom access on Liberia deportation flight

On August 20, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents beat, restrained, and denied medical care and bathroom access to detainees during a roughly 14-hour deportation flight from Louisiana to Monrovia, Liberia, according to a New York Times investigation based on interviews with 10 of the more than two dozen deportees aboard. The flight carried the first of an expected 1,200 people the United States has agreed to send to Liberia under a bilateral third-country deportation arrangement that took effect in September 2025 and scaled to bulk use in August 2026.

Leonardo Sanchez, a 49-year-old Cuban national with a surgically repaired abdominal wound, said agents refused to remove his restraints or let him use the toilet during the flight, so he wet himself; when the plane landed in Monrovia and he and three others refused to disembark out of fear of being abandoned in an unfamiliar country, he said agents forced him onto the tarmac, knelt on his abdomen, and twisted his handcuffs, leaving him in pain with his pants still wet. Five deportees said agents beat people who protested, including slamming some to the ground and striking them; other deportees described being held for days without beds in an unheated room they called "the freezer," a woman restrained by her wrists and ankles when she asked about a son who had been separated from her, and denial of prenatal care to pregnant detainees.

Six of the deportees who refused to disembark in Liberia -- four Cuban men, a Brazilian man, and a Cameroonian woman -- were instead flown on to Equatorial Guinea, where a lawyer in contact with the group said they arrived "in chains and in extreme distress," including Sanchez, whose injuries doctors who reviewed them said required surgery he had not received. The Department of Homeland Security said on the record that no detainee was denied bathroom access, that Sanchez was examined and declared fit to fly, that his medical needs were addressed in flight, and that agents did not kneel or press on his abdomen; it did not address most of the deportees' other allegations, including the account of the restrained woman or the days spent in the unheated holding room.

Updates

2026-09-08 — Deportee identified as Pietro Graza; held incommunicado in Equatorial Guinea [3][4]

Reporting identified the previously unnamed Brazilian man among the six deportees flown on to Equatorial Guinea as Pietro Graza de Lima, 57, of Florida. An immigration judge had granted Graza protection under the Convention Against Torture on April 16, 2026, before ICE continued to detain him and pursued his removal to a third country anyway. Held with other deportees at the Hotel Bamy in Malabo, Graza told LOOKOUT that armed police confiscated his phone -- his only means of contact with his attorney -- on September 8, after he gave a press interview, and he has been unreachable since. His attorney, Kate O'Donnell, said Graza and a co-detainee faced "de facto criminalization" and the risk of "terrible violence" over their sexual orientation, citing State Department findings on violence against LGBTQI+ people in Equatorial Guinea. Graza said Guinean officials had told him they would facilitate his return to Brazil, where he fears retaliation from police he had previously accused of extortion and of involvement in a shooting that cost him a kidney. Brazil's foreign ministry separately confirmed to Brazilian media it was tracking his case, and as of September 2 described him as in good health at the same hotel.