Beneath the tropical sun off Central Africa’s coast, the Bamy Hotel on Bioko Island looks indistinguishable from any luxury resort from the outside: palm trees frame a sweeping driveway, polished marble lines the foyer, and a stately portrait of Equatorial Guinea’s long-ruling president hangs behind the mahogany front desk. But behind this polished facade, the once-bustling property has been transformed into an improvised prison for asylum seekers, part of a secretive $7.5 million agreement between the authoritarian Equatorial Guinean government and the former Trump administration, an Associated Press investigation has found.
The AP gained rare access to the site during a recent trip accompanying the first papal visit to the country, making it the only international news outlet to directly report on conditions inside the locked-down hotel. Since the agreement took effect late last year, the property has remained eerily empty of the tourists and business travelers it was built to host. Only a small cohort of detainees, all asylum seekers deported from the United States, remain confined within its walls, held against their will far from their home countries.
According to legal representatives for the detainees, at least 32 people have been held at the Bamy Hotel since November. Every single one had already received formal protection from deportation by U.S. judges, who ruled they faced grave danger if forced to return to their home nations across Africa. To date, 25 of these protected asylum seekers have already been forcibly transferred back to the countries they fled, while the remaining detainees face relentless pressure from Equatorial Guinean authorities to agree to repatriation.
Immigration legal experts describe these third-country deportation deals as a deliberate legal loophole crafted by the Trump administration to bypass U.S. asylum protections. Rather than directly deporting at-risk seekers back to dangerous home countries in violation of U.S. court orders, the administration instead sends them to intermediate nations like Equatorial Guinea, where authorities can then force them to complete the journey home.
As an authoritarian state with widespread reports of human rights abuses, Equatorial Guinea restricts nearly all access for foreign independent journalists, making on-the-ground reporting extremely rare. What the AP found inside the hotel is a surreal blend of luxury accommodation and psychological torture: detainees wander empty, ornate corridors, staring out at a shimmering swimming pool they are barred from using, trapped in a country most had never heard of before their arrival. Men and women from Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Mauritania make up the detainee population, and all have reported no physical abuse — but overwhelming psychological distress from the constant threat of forced return to countries where they face persecution, imprisonment or death.
“I am scared and depressed,” a 26-year-old East African detainee told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, like the two other detainees interviewed for this report. Because of his ethnicity and his previous activism in his home country, he said he is certain he will be killed if he is forced to return. Human rights experts confirm all detainees held at Bamy Hotel face a high risk of severe persecution upon repatriation.
The Trump administration’s third-country deportation strategy has resulted in thousands of asylum seekers being sent to roughly 24 nations not their own, according to advocacy group Third Country Deportation Watch. Most of these partner nations are in the developing world, with roughly a dozen located across Africa. Immigration policy experts say nations like Equatorial Guinea agree to take these detainees to earn political and economic goodwill from the U.S. in ongoing negotiations over trade, foreign aid and migration policy.
The daily routine for detainees is mundane, the 26-year-old detainee recounted, but made deeply unsettling by the surreal setting and constant uncertainty. Detainees sleep in high-end hotel rooms that are rarely cleaned, and eat rice and meat at linen-covered tables in the closed hotel restaurant. After falling ill multiple times from contaminated food, the East African man said he now eats only the absolute minimum to survive. A local local lawyer provides basic supplies: new toothbrushes, cellphone SIM cards, and sanitary products for female detainees. Medical care is inconsistent at best: when the man developed an eye problem, he was taken to a hospital quickly, but when he contracted malaria and typhoid, authorities waited until his condition had severely deteriorated before arranging care, leaving him severely weakened and requiring intravenous treatment.
The psychological abuse is even more severe. When the man recently complained to a local police officer about his unlawful detention, the officer responded by telling him his problems would end if he simply went to the fourth floor and jumped out a window. “What can I do now? It’s become worse,” he said, his frail body shaking as he spoke. “I started losing my mind.”
The relationship between the U.S. and Equatorial Guinea is a complicated one, defined by deep economic ties even as U.S. officials repeatedly condemn the country’s abysmal human rights record and systemic corruption. A former Spanish colony, Equatorial Guinea descended into economic chaos after gaining independence in 1968, but the discovery of massive offshore oil reserves in the 1990s, developed largely by U.S. energy companies, turned the country into one of Africa’s wealthiest by per capita GDP. Almost all of that oil-fueled wealth has been siphoned off by long-ruling President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his family, rights groups report. His son and heir apparent, Vice President Teodoro “Teodorin” Obiang Nguema, openly flaunts his corrupt fortune on social media, posting videos of private jet travel, infinity pool vacations and lobster feasts — even though the platform is banned for ordinary Equatorial Guinean citizens.
International sanctions were previously levied against Teodorin Obiang over his role in systemic corruption, but the U.S. lifted those sanctions just weeks before the first deportees arrived at Bamy Hotel, allowing him to travel to New York for a high-level U.N. meeting. Today, U.S. companies remain Equatorial Guinea’s largest foreign investors, and the U.S. government funds military training for the country’s security forces. Independent dissent is virtually non-existent: the Obiang administration has been repeatedly accused by the U.S. State Department and global human rights groups of detaining, torturing and extrajudicially killing political opponents.
For the remaining detainees at Bamy Hotel, every day brings new uncertainty: they know they could be deported at any time. The U.N. International Organization for Migration and the U.N. refugee agency visited the hotel in November and promised detainees they would return to assist with their cases. They have not been back since. The 26-year-old East African man is the only remaining detainee who has been allowed to meet with legal representation. Though Equatorial Guinea has no formal asylum framework, his lawyer submitted a formal asylum request to the prime minister’s office, a long-shot attempt to secure his release. He was told he would need to beg for mercy directly from Vice President Teodorin Obiang, and his claim was ultimately rejected. The next morning, authorities deported five other detainees, and told him he would be next.
Neither the Trump administration nor the Obiang administration responded to requests for comment on the $7.5 million deal or the conditions at the Bamy Hotel. A State Department spokesperson offered only a broad statement: “we remain unwavering in our commitment to end illegal and mass immigration.”