Lawyers for 11 West African migrants sent by the United States to Ghana this month have filed a complaint against the Ghanaian authorities, saying they are being unlawfully detained, held in a secret location against their will and deprived of their rights.
Fourteen people were taken from their cells in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in the middle of the night on Sept. 5 and put on a military cargo plane to Ghana, with some claiming they were placed in straitjackets, according to legal filings. Three of the migrants have since been sent back to their home countries, and 11 remain in Ghana.
Ghana’s foreign minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, has said that the West African country took the migrants in on humanitarian grounds, in a spirit of pan-African solidarity.
But the court filing says that they were forced to go to Ghana “under the instruction or connivance of foreign and local actors” — meaning the United States. It also says they are being guarded by military personnel without having been formally charged and without access to local lawyers.
While defending the deportations this month, Justice Department lawyers did not dispute that Ghana sending the migrants to their home countries would violate their court-ordered protections. The lawyers instead argued that once a migrant had been removed from the United States and was in foreign custody, the issue was out of their hands.
“The United States is not saying that this is OK,” Elianis N. Pérez, a Justice Department lawyer, said during a hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “What the United States is saying is that the United States does not have the power to tell Ghana what to do.”
The migrants’ filing adds that, for some of them, the risk of persecution if they are sent home has actually increased since they arrived in Ghana. Some of the migrants, being Nigerian, were forced to meet a Nigerian official, the filing said, “despite their explicit fears that contact with Nigerian authorities could expose them to reprisals or persecution upon return.”
One of the Nigerians had said in a separate legal filing that he had been beaten and tortured by police officers and soldiers back home, and that they had threatened to kill him if they saw him again.
According to that lawsuit, another migrant was deported from Ghana to Gambia, despite having been granted a legal protection in the United States preventing his deportation to Gambia because he is bisexual. Relationships between men are illegal there, carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
Lawyers for migrants say the case is the latest example of the Trump administration’s tactic of sending migrants to third countries when the migrants in question had protective orders preventing their deportation to their home countries.
In July, eight migrants were sent to South Sudan, a country on the verge of civil war, after weeks of waiting, shackled, on a U.S. military base in Djibouti. Only one of them was originally from South Sudan. Another five migrants were sent to a prison in Eswatini, a country in Southern Africa of which none of them were citizens.
A previous lawsuit filed in Washington last week accused the Trump administration of deporting some of the 14 migrants wrongfully, since they had protective orders because they faced the threat of torture and persecution in their home countries. But a judge said on Monday that she could not intervene and stop them from being sent to their home countries, since they had already been sent to Ghana.
The Washington lawsuit said the migrants were being held in “abysmal and deplorable” conditions in Dema Camp, a military detention facility about 50 miles outside Ghana’s capital, Accra. It said they were sleeping in tents, had little running water and had been unable to change clothes for five days.
But the Ghanaian suit said that it was unclear at which military facility they were being held.
Mr. Okudzeto Ablakwa, the foreign minister, said on Monday that his country had taken in the deported West Africans in an effort to save them from the suffering and rights violations that they were being subjected to in America. He suggested that it was an ongoing arrangement and that Ghana would take more West African deportees — but denied that his country had accepted any kind of financial compensation.
“We are only helping our brothers and sisters. We are coming in purely on humanitarian grounds, expressing pan-African solidarity — which Ghana is famed for,” Mr. Okudzeto Ablakwa said, responding to journalists’ questions at a televised event. “We should rather be seen as a country that wants to look out for its fellow Africans.”
SOURCE: nytimes.com