Since December 2025, following the signing of an agreement and a payment of approximately $7.5 million by the United States to the Government of Equatorial Guinea, the Trump Administration has begun transferring third-country nationals to Equatorial Guinea as part of its migration enforcement policy. This payment follows a steady increase in U.S. assistance to Equatorial Guinea in recent years, reaching up to $500,000 in 2024, despite the country’s well-documented record of systematic corruption, repression, and human rights abuses.
Individuals from African and European countries—including people with pending asylum claims—have been detained by U.S. authorities and deported to Equatorial Guinea rather than to their countries of origin.
Based on our monitoring and direct engagement with affected individuals and their legal representatives, we are deeply concerned that this policy is placing vulnerable people at serious risk of harm.
Local counsel in Equatorial Guinea have filed asylum petitions on behalf of several deportees who demonstrated a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries, including risks of torture, enslavement, and other grave human rights violations. Despite these filings, Equatoguinean authorities have proceeded to deport some of these individuals back to their countries of origin without due process or any meaningful assessment of their protection claims.
These actions violate the fundamental principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits the return of any person to a country where they face a real risk of persecution or torture. This obligation is enshrined in international law, including the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Convention Against Torture.
We are particularly alarmed by the emerging pattern of chain refoulement: individuals are transferred by the United States to Equatorial Guinea—a country that lacks an independent judiciary, a functioning asylum system, and adequate human rights protections—only to be expelled onward to the very countries they fled. This creates a foreseeable and unlawful cycle of forced returns that exposes people to serious harm.
Any express or implied assurances by the Government of Equatorial Guinea that it will respect human rights, combat human trafficking or corruption, or work with UNHCR and IOM to protect migrants and refugees fly in the face of a 46-year history of dictatorship during which the presidential family has captured the entire state apparatus for self enrichment. For decades, the government of Equatorial Guinea has consistently ignored UN recommendations, international human rights mandates, and its treaty obligations. Its pattern of arbitrary detention, lack of due process, and repression of civil society is well documented.
Relying on such a government to provide meaningful protection to asylum seekers is not only unrealistic—it is dangerous.
EG Justice therefore calls on the United States to:
- Immediately halt deportations of third-country nationals to Equatorial Guinea;
- Ensure that all individuals with protection claims receive full and fair asylum procedures;
- Prevent any form of direct or indirect refoulement; and
- Align migration enforcement with international human rights and refugee law obligations.
Human lives and fundamental legal protections must not be sacrificed in the name of migration control. The prohibition against refoulement is absolute—and must be respected.