Photo credit: AP News
At first glance, the Balmy Hotel looks like any other on the tropical Island off the Central African coast, with its palm tree-lined driveway, marble-floored foyer and portrait of the oil-rich country’s president hanging beyond a mahogany reception desk.
The Associated Press reports that the hotel is not a refuge for adventure-seeking tourists or international business travellers these days. Since late last year, only a small number of people have been staying there, and they aren’t on vacation. They are being held against their will.
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.
But the hotel is just a way station. Of the at least 32 people imprisoned there since November, all of whom had previously been granted protection from US judges, their lawyer said, 25 have been forced to go back to their home countries across Africa, where their lives might be in danger. The rest face pressure from authorities to leave.
The Trump administration uses deportations to third countries as a legal loophole, immigration lawyers say, to indirectly force asylum seekers back to their home countries.
Since Equatorial Guinea is run by an authoritarian government – as are some other countries that have signed similar deals – it is difficult for foreign journalists to visit and report on the conditions there directly.
