For nearly a year, the Hotel Bamy in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, has been Adam’s prison. He is confined alone to a hotel room, under constant watch by the security officers and soldiers of a notoriously oppressive regime who control his movements. Not long ago, they barged into his room, handcuffed and beat him, and warned him not to tell anyone. There is no cell to point to, no charges or formal sentence, and nothing on paper to document his plight.
Adam, 26, has chosen not to share his real name or even his country of origin out of fear for his safety. He fled indefinite, forced military conscription in his home country after enduring abuse during his military service.
Adam sought safety in the United States. A US immigration judge heard his case, found that he would probably face persecution if forced to return to his country of origin, and issued a formal order shielding him from removal there. Then, in November 2025, the United States sent him to Equatorial Guinea, a country he had never set foot in and where torture reportedly occurs in every prison nationwide, according to the most recent state department human rights report. Adam, and the other men onboard the flight, were told they were being transferred to another US detention facility. It was only midway through the 13 hour and 10 minute flight that they found out – while shackled – that they were headed toward Equatorial Guinea.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. In November, the Trump administration repurposed $7.5m to pay the government of Equatorial Guinea to accept third country nationals from the United States, a 275% foreign assistance increase and departure from longstanding US policy against direct provision of aid to a deeply corrupt and abusive regime. Congress appropriated these taxpayer funds for humanitarian assistance for refugees in dire need – money that is now used to detain, shackle and eventually send refugees back to the countries they fled. Since then, the US government has forcibly transferred at least 65 third country nationals to Equatorial Guinea. US immigration judges had granted protection to nearly all of these individuals due to the high risk of persecution or torture they face in their countries of origin. Yet one by one, Equatorial Guinea has been sending them back to harm in the very places from which they fled.
In the past few weeks, in retaliation for speaking out against the detention conditions and police violence, police in Equatorial Guinea violently assaulted and arrested two of the refugees, witnesses and lawyers say, including Ahmed Soliman, an Egyptian man from Arizona who has lived in the United States since he was three years old, and Samson Birhane. Today, they remain in police custody, detained incommunicado.
This is part of an escalating scheme by the Trump administration to send immigrants and refugees to countries around the world where they have no connection and often face grave harm. In Equatorial Guinea, it is also fueling the corruption and impunity our organizations have spent decades documenting and countering.
Equatorial Guinea’s government and ruling family are, by any measure, among the most corrupt on earth. About a decade ago, the US justice department settled a civil forfeiture case against the country’s vice-president, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, or “Teodorín”. He forfeited a $30m Malibu mansion, a Ferrari and Michael Jackson memorabilia.
Some governments have rightly taken serious action to restrain Teodorín’s corruption, such as the sanctions the UK government imposed on him in 2021. Yet last September, the Trump administration did the opposite, and quietly paused corruption-related visa restrictions that had prevented Teodorín from traveling to the United States, clearing the way for him to meet with Christopher Landau, the US deputy secretary of state, before the deal to accept non-Equatoguineans removed from the United States.
In addition to these funds, the deal affords Teodorin something he has long sought: legitimacy and access in Washington DC.
We are seeing that access to US policymakers deepening in real time. Last week, Teodorín was back in New York, meeting with Landau again, this time at the United Nations, where they celebrated what the government of Equatorial Guinea referred to as a positive evolution of the bilateral relationship. They discussed expanding cooperation beyond energy to banking, trade investment, security and diplomacy.
Our organizations have worked for years to demand accountability for rampant corruption in Equatorial Guinea, and now, to fight for the refugees and torture victims being unlawfully sent there. After building the evidentiary dossier that led to UK sanctions, EG Justice is now challenging Equatorial Guinea’s participation in the US deportation scheme before the African Commission on People’s and Human Rights, while working with local attorneys to offer legal and humanitarian aid. In July, the African Commission on Human and People’s rights issued an emergency ruling, ordering the government of Equatorial Guinea not to send people back to danger in their home country – a ruling that the government has ignored since, sending four people back to the very places from which they had sought, and received, protection.
Human Rights First (HRF), for its part, together with partner organizations, successfully challenged the third-country deportation policy in federal court, but the US supreme court has since intervened to allow these rapid third-country deportations to resume while it rules on the case. HRF also leads the ICE Flight Monitor platform, uncovering in real time hidden deportation flights to Equatorial Guinea and beyond, while partnering with Refugees International to shed light on proliferating and often opaque US third-country forced transfer agreements with 35 countries.
Time is of the essence, as Adam has been sick with malaria and typhoid fever since November. His second asylum claim, filed with Equatoguinean authorities in January, remains in indefinite limbo. The judge in the case told local counsel that he does not have authority to hear it, as the vice-president is in charge of these cases. The habeas corpus petition his lawyer filed also remains unanswered. Guards tell him repeatedly to “go back to your country,” the very outcome a US judge already ruled would put him at high risk of persecution.
There is a clearcut, fair, and humane path forward. We are pressing for coordinated Magnitsky-style sanctions against senior Equatoguinean officials, including Teodorín, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and the European Union simultaneously, building on the evidentiary dossier the UK relied on in 2021. In the United States, Congress must exercise fully its oversight authority to end misappropriation of migration and refugee resettlement funds to finance arbitrary detention and chain refoulement – and, in effect, to reward torturers.
Adam and everyone held at Hotel Bamy should be released and given the chance to have their asylum claims heard in a country capable of hearing them, or returned to live safely in the United States. They deserve the protection that was promised to them and is enshrined in US and international law.
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Tutu Alicante is founder and executive director of EG Justice
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Uzra Zeya is president and CEO of Human Rights First