At least five people who were deported by the United States to Liberia but resisted getting off the plane were flown to Equatorial Guinea 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 refusing to get off a deportation flight in a country to which they had no ties and being flown to another such country.
The rapid switch shows how widely the U.S. government has cultivated countries to serve as destinations for deportation through a secretive deal-making campaign.
The deportees who resisted were part of a deal struck by the government of Liberia with the Trump administration to take up to 1,200 deportees from the United States in the next year.
Among the migrants sent to Equatorial Guinea, in Central Africa, from Liberia, in West Africa, were four 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.
“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, and that the case raised concerns about whether a “defined, transparent process” was followed.
The Department of Homeland Security said on Friday that the migrants who had refused to get off the plane in Liberia had been “deported to a safe third country,” but it did not respond to questions about whether the five had been sent to Equatorial Guinea. The department said it was “applying the law as written.”
The five who resisted were among 20 deportees flown by the United States to Roberts International Airport in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. U.S. federal agents escorting the deportees forced them off the plane, but eventually all five were returned to the aircraft.
Three of the deportees who resisted deplaning in Liberia identified themselves as Carlos Rodriguez Lopez, Darwin Hernandez and Emilio Destrade Correoso and said they were all from Cuba. They described a “terrifying” ordeal in phone interviews with The New York Times.
Speaking in Spanish, they said that while resisting disembarking in Liberia, officers placed knees on their necks. They were eventually put back on the plane and told by federal agents that they would be returned to the United States. But they landed in Equatorial Guinea instead. There, they said, they were met by dozens of masked officers carrying semiautomatic guns.
“We thought they were trafficking us like they traffic people in other countries,” said Mr. Rodriguez Lopez. He said that in Liberia, at one point, four officers restrained him at once.
The migrants said they were taken in handcuffs in a van to a remote hotel in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, that is patrolled by armed guards and where other deportees have been held.
The men said that, now, they were worried because they knew that other deportees had remained in Equatorial Guinea for months and they did not know how the government there would handle their immigration status.
Later on Friday, the Department of Homeland Security did not comment on the three migrants’ accounts.
The U.S. 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. Washington approved a $5 million payment to Liberia in connection with the deal to send migrants there, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
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, and Refugees International. 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, Human Rights First 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.
