Deported to Equatorial Guinea with a large abdominal hernia: ‘I’m not worth a dime’

Faces have blurred with the days, as they slowly sank into the reality of waking up in America and suddenly finding themselves in Africa. On board an ICE Air flight that left Alexandria, Louisiana, on August 20, there was a man who, nevertheless, almost everyone will remember. “He’s Cuban, yes, a Cuban whose insides were bulging out of his belly,” says a young Colombian who cannot precisely identify what he saw. A Honduran on the same plane also noticed the protrusion showing through the other passenger’s stomach, “like it was intestine, everything was open, his belly sticking out.” When that man and four others refused to get off the plane in Liberia and were taken on to Equatorial Guinea, no one cared that he was ill and fell face-first onto the tarmac as he was shoved.

The man’s mother, Caridad, hasn’t been able to eat at home in Lehigh Acres, Florida. His sister, Dorty Sánchez, is desperate. One day they went on Facebook and watched a video from Equatorial Guinea. One of the people deported there reported that someone traveling with him was in very poor health. “He said there was a young man with an open belly and that his name was Leonardo Sánchez. And if he has an open belly and his name is Leonardo, then that’s my brother, it can’t be anyone else.”

That is how the family learned that Sánchez, who until now had been held in Texas, was even farther away from them despite being a lawful permanent U.S. resident. They say he had been arrested for drug possession and had been doing community service hours. Last year, at a gas station, he was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and initially taken to the Alligator Alcatraz facility. Since then, his mother and sister have done everything they could to get him out of detention. “We had hired a lawyer from the Wannamaker firm and, supposedly, there were options because of his medical condition.” But that lawyer, they say, scammed them, and now Sánchez is in a faraway place, his body aching, not knowing whether he will be able to have the surgery — his tenth — that is scheduled at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

“I’m not worth a dime,” Sánchez says, appearing on a video call with EL PAÍS from a room at the Bamy Hotel in the city of Malabo. The hotel is owned by the family of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the country’s president, who has been in power for almost half a century. This month, several reports said some people were threatened at gunpoint in that hotel, where the government was also housing Ebola patients. For some time, the facility has also been hosting deportees who have arrived in the country as part of a $7.5 million agreement with the administration of Donald Trump.

Sánchez strokes his beard; he hasn’t been able to shave. They haven’t even given him a toothbrush, toothpaste, or clothes. Four days after his arrival, he was still wearing the same gray pants he left the United States in on the more than 36-hour flight alongside about 20 other deportees who were never told they were bound for Africa. During the trip they were given sandwiches and water they could barely bring to their mouths while remaining handcuffed and shackled. Sánchez says he wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom the entire time. “I wet my pants three times,” he says.

As soon as he reached the hotel he washed his pants and the binder — the only one he has to support the bulge in his abdomen. Sánchez clutches his stomach constantly, as if holding himself together to stop his body from spilling apart. Nearly 10 years ago, in Hialeah, he was stabbed several times. “His intestine was damaged, he was in a coma for 40 days. The skin was left open and they had to graft it and put the colon to the side,” his sister says. Later, when he fell into ICE custody, he found his attackers had also been detained, but they were released. “They put the man who stabbed me in my same unit and then released him. I told the judge that,” he says.

That lump everyone notices on his stomach is a large abdominal hernia. Ever since he developed it, Sánchez has been unable to lift more than 20 pounds, has trouble finding work, and suffers from pain he finds unbearable. At the hotel — which is guarded by armed personnel and which they are not allowed to leave — he has only been given paracetamol to relieve the discomfort.

They also took him to a local hospital. “But at the hospital, they said that if I didn’t have any documents, the doctors wouldn’t take responsibility for me. They asked the officer who brought me there if he was responsible, and he said no, that he’d just been sent there. The doctor said, ‘If you won’t take responsibility, how are we supposed to?’” Sánchez recounts.

At a time when the U.S. government has signed deportation agreements with more than a dozen African countries, concern centers not only on the danger and legal limbo these people face but also on the medical care they receive. Savi Arvey, director of policy for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First, a rights organization that has tracked these deportations, says they are “deeply concerned” about the situation in Equatorial Guinea. “People held in the hotel are deprived of access to essential medical care and subjected to conditions that further endanger their health and well-being, while suffering physical abuses by guards and being pressured to return precisely to the countries they fled to escape persecution or torture,” she says.

Over weeks of speaking with migrants of various nationalities sent to the Central African Republic, Liberia, and Equatorial Guinea, this newspaper confirmed that not only are they not receiving adequate medical care, but they can barely communicate with doctors in places where most people speak French. Some have reported stomach problems and allergies from the water or food. Others have experienced malarial episodes.

Pietro Lima, a 56-year-old Brazilian also deported to Equatorial Guinea, needs medication after losing 30% of his intestine and a kidney because of gunshot wounds sustained in his home country. “ICE had my medication on hand and I’ve been without it for five days; I need to take it. I spoke to people here and they know nothing about it,” he says.

When asked about Sánchez’s health and that of other migrants deported to Africa, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman told El PAÍS that “all of these undocumented migrants were deported to a safe third country.” “We are enforcing the law as written. If a judge determines an undocumented immigrant has no right to remain in this country, we will remove them. Period. The Trump administration is using every legal option to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, as President Trump promised,” the spokesman said. The State Department has not yet responded to this newspaper’s questions.

“This is human trafficking”

The flight that left Louisiana on August 20 made a refueling stop in Dakar, Senegal. It then continued to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, a country that agreed to receive migrants under a $5 million deal with Washington. Pietro Lima, the Brazilian, never thought he would end up there. “Three days earlier, at the detention center, they tried to force me to sign a paper saying whether I wanted to go to Liberia and I didn’t sign it,” he says.

In Liberia, some migrants disembarked, but a small group refused to get off the plane. Pietro and the Cubans Darwin Hernández, Emilio Destrade, Carlos Rodríguez, and Leonardo Sánchez were prepared to do anything to avoid stepping into a territory they did not know. Through the plane windows they could see a large police deployment. “We told them we didn’t feel safe, but they forced us to get off. They carried me between four people and beat me while I was handcuffed,” Rodríguez says. Leonardo Sánchez was thrown down the aircraft stairs and landed on the tarmac with his hernia exposed.

The Cubans and the Brazilian began to protest. “We are not from Africa, we’re from another part of the world,” Rodríguez told them. Because of the commotion, they were returned to the plane, and ICE officers told them to remain calm, that they would take them back to the United States. The plane changed course and almost three hours later they were in Equatorial Guinea — an unprecedented incident, the first time a group of deportees has refused to disembark from an ICE plane and ended up somewhere else.

“How can a government, in the space of a few hours, send us to another country, and that country accept us?” Rodríguez asks. “This is human trafficking, they trafficked us on a plane.”

The government of Equatorial Guinea, which has been receiving deportees since late 2025, issued a statement saying it would treat “any national of a third country transferred by the Government of the United States of America to Equatorial Guinea consistently with its international legal obligations” and that they would not be “subjected to persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, nor to torture.”

Finally, the migrants arrived at Malabo International Airport, shortly after 8:00 p.m. According to Lima, they were taken down a rear part of the terminal, in the dark, away from the public eye. “To hide from people what was happening,” he says. “When the plane landed we asked ourselves: what place is this? Nobody told us anything. They asked us to get off and we still refused. But we saw more than 30 hooded police officers with weapons below. We were scared.”

Still handcuffed, they were taken by van to the Bamy Hotel, just a couple miles from the airport, about a 10-minute drive. “We are the only Latinos here,” Rodríguez says. “We are prisoners here. If we are free, as they say, why can’t we cook our food or go to the market to buy it?” To this day they have no identification, no passports or legal documents provided by Liberian or Equatorial Guinean authorities. They do not know what will happen to them.

Michael Flynn, executive director of the Global Detention Project, an organization that researches and documents the detention of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees worldwide, told this newspaper that Equatorial Guinea “lacks an asylum framework to properly process refugee claims.” “Testimonies from detainees indicate they are not receiving safe or adequate food, that they are not being provided necessary medical treatment and that they have no clear idea what is happening to them or what their fate will be. The uncertainty must be truly agonizing,” he says. “The detention of these people is part of a deeply troubling trend in which migrants are deported from the United States to countries with which they have no significant ties, and then subjected to detention, often with little or no access to legal assistance or effective remedies.”

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