5 Deportees Are Flown by US to Equatorial Guinea After they Resist Deplaning in Liberia

At least five people who were deported by the United States to Liberia but resisted getting off the plane were flown to Equatorial Guinea, in Central Africa, on Thursday, according to a U.S. official and lawyers familiar with their cases.

It is the first reported case in the administration’s so-called third-country deportation campaign of migrants who refused to get off a deportation flight in a country to which they had no ties being flown to another such country.

The deportees who resisted were part of a deal struck by the government of Liberia, in West Africa, with the Trump administration to take up to 1,200 deportees from the United States in the next year.

Among the migrants sent on from Liberia were three Cuban men, a Brazilian person and a Cameroonian woman, said Alexandra Smolyar, a lawyer at Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta, a legal group that represents migrants deported to Equatorial Guinea as part of a separate deportation deal.

The migrants were taken in handcuffs to a remote hotel in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, that is patrolled by armed guards and where other deportees have been held, Ms. Smolyar said. Their status there as of Friday afternoon was unclear.

The Department of Homeland Security said the migrants who had refused to disembark in Liberia had been “deported to a safe third country.” But it did not respond to questions about whether they had been sent to Equatorial Guinea. The department said it was “applying the law as written.”

The group, among 20 deportees flown by the United States to Liberia, refused to get off a plane at Roberts International Airport in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, and were restrained for several minutes. U.S. federal agents blocking the deportees forced the five individuals off the plane, but eventually all were returned to the aircraft, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the operation.

Shortly afterward, they were flown to Equatorial Guinea.

“What happened here, a large group refusing removal on one end and then being moved onward to yet another country, is highly unusual,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior adviser at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She added that she did not know of another such case under the Trump administration.

The deal with Liberia is one of the largest struck by the Trump administration so far for third-country deportations, in which people are expelled from the United States but are not initially sent to their home countries.

Both I.C.E. and the State Department are under pressure from the White House to find places to deport migrants the government cannot send to their home countries, usually because a judge has ruled that they will most likely face persecution and torture there. In many of those cases, countries taking the deportees can receive money or favors in return.

Weeks before Equatorial Guinea announced its own agreement, the Trump administration temporarily lifted sanctions on its vice president, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, so that he could enter the United States for the U.N. General Assembly. The United States also wired $7.5 million to the country, federal data showed.

The Trump administration has made deportation deals with more than 35 countries, according to Human Rights First, a nonprofit group that tracks deportations. Many of the countries are in Africa, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Ghana and South Sudan.

Dozens of migrants who are not from Equatorial Guinea have been sent to that country since November 2025, according to the nonprofit group. Many of them were later sent “onward to the very places from which they fled,” despite U.S. court protections, the group said.

Lawyers and experts said the deportations raised questions about whether the migrants had information about where they were being taken and an opportunity to express their fears.

“It’s very alarming to see that these people could have been deported to Liberia and then hours later to be put on a plane again by force and taken to yet another third country, in this case a fourth country, presumably having no notice that they might have been sent to Equatorial Guinea,” Ms. Smolyar said.

Madeleine Ngo contributed reporting.