The Associated Press visited the site in May 2026 and described it plainly: “Under an opaque $7.5 million deal with the Trump administration, Equatorial Guinea's all-powerful president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has turned this hotel owned by his family into a prison for asylum seekers deported” from the United States.
On September 18, 2026, the Guardian reported what happened there a week earlier. “Two men that the Trump administration expelled to Equatorial Guinea were bound, fitted with bags over their heads, beaten and pushed down a flight of stairs, all in plain view of other US deportees, according to witnesses and human rights lawyers.”
The distinction that matters for responsibility: the beatings were carried out by Equatorial Guinean police, not by U.S. personnel. What the United States did was pay a government with one of the world's worst corruption and human-rights records to hold people it deported, including people who held U.S. court orders protecting them from removal to their own countries.
AP's earlier reporting from inside the hotel documented the conditions and the despair, including an account of an officer telling a detainee his problems would go away if he went to the fourth floor and jumped out the window.
Equatorial Guinea has been the subject of filings to United Nations bodies and the African Commission over these transfers.
This is a third-country removal arrangement, the mechanism by which people who cannot lawfully be sent home are sent somewhere else instead. The money, the destination and the absence of a public agreement are the administration's decisions.
Update (October 8, 2026): A federal judge in Arizona ordered the government to facilitate the release and return of Ahmed Soliman, an Egyptian man removed to Equatorial Guinea, finding the removal violated due process. An immigration judge had granted him protection from removal to Egypt under the Convention Against Torture, finding he “faces a clear probability of torture in Egypt” because of his sexual orientation and his politically prominent family, but he was sent to Equatorial Guinea without notice or a chance to raise a fear claim. “It is unrebutted that he has since been held under armed guard; threatened at gunpoint; and arrested, beaten, and held incommunicado by Equatorial Guinean authorities,” the court wrote.