By Enyichukwu Enemanna
At least six persons deported by the United States to Liberia last week who resisted getting off their flight were sent to Equatorial Guinea, another African nation which signed a third-country deportation agreement with Washington, an eyewitness and a lawyer in contact with the six people said on Monday.
Under a series of agreements, advocates say the Donald Trump administration has deported thousands of people to two dozen countries that aren’t their nations of origin as it pushes ahead with its immigration crackdown.
Immigration lawyers say the practice is being used as a legal loophole to indirectly return some asylum seekers to countries from where they fled.
The group who refused to get off the plane in Liberia on Thursday include four Cuban nationals, a Brazilian man and a Cameroonian woman, the person and lawyer said.
A Honduran deportee aboard the flight who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the group refused to disembark, saying Liberia was “not their country” and that they would face danger there. They were then separated from the others, he said.
According to him, the other passengers got off in Liberia because they feared officers would force them.
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 instead were flown to Malabo city in Equatorial Guinea.
“It was a really heartbreaking and chaotic scene when they arrived in Malabo on Thursday,” Yoon said.
Some arrived in chains and in extreme distress, she said, 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.
There is no medical staff at the hotel in Equatorial Guinea where the six are being held, alongside around 40 other deported migrants, she added.
Conditions at the hotel have worsened in recent months, Yoon said, with food sometimes withheld and guards accused of threatening, beating and choking some of the migrants.
