A hotel in Malabo and the price of transactional diplomacy
By Dr. James E. Sulton Jr.
JA International Correspondent
On the outskirts of Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, a decommissioned hotel called the Bamy has become something its architects never intended: an indefinite detention site for people the United States government wanted out of the country and could not lawfully return to their homes. Armed police stand guard around the clock.
According to The New York Times, the nearly thirty men and women inside the Bamy have no legal status in Equatorial Guinea, no charges against them, and no documents permitting them to live or work there.
The hotel is reportedly owned by the family of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. His four-decade rule is a euphemism for oil-financed corruption.
What has happened inside the Bamy should trouble Americans regardless of their views on immigration enforcement.
On September 5, 2026, national police pointed what appeared to be semi-automatic rifles at deportees after a Cuban man asked for the return of his confiscated phone. Reuters reviewed video of the encounter and of a man forced to his knees. Six days later, officers arrested two deportees – Ahmed Soliman, 31, who came to Phoenix from Egypt at age four, and Samson Birhane, who arrived as an Eritrean refugee at 13. Amnesty International reports police covered their heads with black bags, beat them on the head, back and ribs while demanding to know where they had hidden their phones. Police reportedly pushed one man down a flight of stairs before holding both in an overcrowded cell without access to counsel. The human rights organization concluded the arrests were payback for speaking publicly. Earlier accounts from the same hotel describe detainees being dragged from their rooms at gunpoint by intoxicated guards and told they would be shot if they left the grounds.
The legal architecture behind this inhumanity is worth stating plainly. Sixty-six people have been flown to Equatorial Guinea on seven flights since November 2025. They are from eleven African countries as well as Georgia, Jamaica, Brazil and Cuba, according to Third Country Deportation Watch. Nearly all of them had already won protection from American immigration judges who found they would face persecution, torture or death if returned to their home countries of nationality. Removal to a third country is the workaround: the protective order is technically honored while the person is deposited somewhere else entirely.
Equatorial Guinea then tells the deportees asylum is unavailable there and prepares to send them onward. Almost half have already been returned to the very countries the protections covered – including eight Ethiopians repatriated in early September after a hunger strike, and a Mauritanian man having escaped hereditary slavery and is now in hiding.
This arrangement rests on money rather than law. The State Department moved $7.5 million from its Migration and Refugee Assistance account to Equatorial Guinea, a transfer Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) flagged as highly unusual in late 2025. A February 2026 minority report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee found the broader program has cost tens of millions of dollars, in some cases exceeding one million dollars per person, with little measurable enforcement benefit and no meaningful monitoring of what becomes of the deportees. A coalition of lawyers has taken the matter to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights on behalf of fourteen deportees, though the Commission’s orders are not binding.
This is where the foreign-policy costs come into view. The United States has now struck removal arrangements with roughly a dozen African governments, negotiated in secret and often leveraged against aid dependency, tariffs or visa access. This American pattern is always transactional rather than relational. Washington signed a critical-minerals agreement with the Democratic Republic of Congo in December 2025 covering cobalt, tantalum, lithium and copper; the DRC began accepting third-country deportees four months later. One does not have to allege a formal quid pro quo to see the shape of the exchange: African states are approached as service providers for American domestic politics and as suppliers of strategic commodities, while democratic governance and human rights – once the stated content of the relationship – disappear.
The men and women forcibly held at gunpoint at the Bamy hotel are the cost of that reordering. They were beaten for filming what was done to them, in a country chosen in part because its government asks few questions. A policy that must be conducted this furtively is a policy whose designers already know how it would read in daylight.
