ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — Authorities in Ghana pushed back Tuesday on claims that four African immigrants recently deported by the U.S. remain in Ghanaian detention, reiterating their assertion that all such migrants have been returned to their home countries.
The government said Monday that all 14 of the deportees had been returned to their countries of origin in West Africa. On Tuesday, Ghana’s presidential spokesperson Felix Kwakye Ofosu said in an interview with The Associated Press that 13 Nigerians
were sent home on a bus and that one Gambian was sent home on a plane.
Lawyers for four of the Nigerians said in U.S. court filings Monday and in interviews with the AP that the four were still being held in a facility in Ghana. The lawyers said the Nigerians faced persecution in their home country, but a judge rejected their request for a court order to return them to the U.S., though she expressed alarm over the deportations.
The Ghanaian government spokesperson denied knowledge of such a facility. “None of them are staying in this country. Nobody is being held in any camp and nobody’s right has been abused,” Ofosu said of the deportees in a phone interview.
The AP could not independently verify the current location of the deportees. However, a lawyer for the Gambian individual, from a different law firm, confirmed that their client was in Gambia.
Nigerian and Gambian government officials told the AP they were neither notified about the deportations nor involved in the process.
Meanwhile, a U.S. judge said that she was powerless to prevent Ghana from returning deportees in its custody to their home countries, declining to intervene in the case, in a victory for the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said that although five of the African deportees had been barred from being sent directly from the U.S. to their home countries because of a likelihood of persecution, her “hands are tied” once they are in Ghana.
Still, she said that the deportations appeared to be against an international treaty on torture, saying she was “alarmed and dismayed” by the “government’s cavalier acceptance of Plaintiffs’ ultimate transfer to countries where they face torture and persecution.”
Chutkan distinguished it from the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deemed by courts to have been wrongly sent by the administration to a prison in his native El Salvador. In the Africa case, unlike in Abrego Garcia, she wrote, the administration could legally send the deportees to Ghana.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration has been seeking ways to deter immigrants from entering the U.S. illegally and remove those who already have done so, especially those accused of crimes and including those who cannot easily be deported to their home countries.
The administration, faced with court decisions that people can’t be sent back to their home countries, has increasingly been trying to send them to third countries under agreements with those governments.
Ghana has joined Eswatini, Rwanda and South Sudan as African countries that have received migrants from third countries who were deported from the U.S.
The lawsuit filed on behalf of some of the migrants said they were held in “straitjackets” for 16 hours on a flight to Ghana on Sept. 5 and detained for days in “squalid conditions” after they arrived there. It said Ghana was doing the Trump administration’s “dirty work.”
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Riccardi reported from Colorado and Asadu from Dakar, Senegal. Associated Press writer Abdoulie John in Banjul, Gambia, contributed.
