The Cuban Carlos Rodríguez López, who was deported by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Liberia airport this Thursday, ended up being held in a hotel in Equatorial Guinea without documents, without legal assistance, and unable to leave.
The case of the Cuban was presented in a video call made to his wife, Igrayne Ribot Hernández, and published this Thursday by the digital creator Raúl Hernández on Facebook.
Rodríguez himself recounted that upon arriving in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, the authorities refused to accept them and promised that they would be returned to the U.S. However, the airplane did not return to that country: it made a stop in Equatorial Guinea.
From a hotel, Carlos Rodríguez described his spouse's arrival as a show of force: "About 50 police officers were waiting for us and they didn’t say anything, they just made us all get out, they searched us, and there were people in masks, everyone was masked, and they put us into a van and brought us to a hotel."
"We are being held here against our will and we don't know anything about whom we should contact, who we need to see, or what is happening to us, because we are in a place from which we cannot leave, we cannot exit this hotel," he explained.
He also added that one of the Cubans has health issues: "They brought four Cubans, and among the four, one has had surgery; his entire stomach is completely externalized."
Igrayne Ribot, a U.S. citizen, publicly denounced the situation in a video initially shared by digital creator Jorge Miyar, identified as El Gussi.
"My husband is a person who committed crimes in the past, for which he did pay. No one deserves to live and go through this. He is a human being; he is not a car or a sack of potatoes," said Igrayne Ribot as she detailed the family ordeal that precedes this situation.
The woman revealed that her husband has been detained by ICE for 16 months and that since November 2025, a habeas corpus has been filed with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana without any resolution: "Ten months of habeas corpus and nothing, nothing is happening."
Carlos Rodríguez López is in Equatorial Guinea without any documents or a passport. His wife emphasized that among the four Cubans detained at the hotel, there is one with a serious medical condition: he has had stomach surgery and his wound is exposed.
Igrayne Ribot directly questioned the inaction of political figures: "I don't know where Marco Rubio is, what Donald Trump promised; they are destroying this country, this family."
The woman, who has a nine-year-old daughter and a family business in the U.S., argued that deporting someone to a third country with which they have no ties is illegal: “What they are doing is illegal, it is inhumane, and we must keep reporting it.”
The habeas corpus of Carlos Rodríguez López remains unresolved while his wife awaits news from the U.S.: “My husband doesn’t have a document, he doesn’t have a passport, he has nothing. He is stranded in Africa, stranded in Africa and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.”
The flight, the first under the agreement between the U.S. and Liberia to receive up to 1,200 deportees in 12 months, transported about 20 immigrants from Louisiana with a stopover in Dakar, Senegal.
Among those deported who arrived were Cubans, according to Reuters citing the Liberian Minister of Information, who explicitly identified the presence of Cubans.
This case is part of a broader practice of the Trump administration.
The U.S. has signed agreements with at least 35 countries and has deported more than 23,000 people to 26 nations under these schemes.
For Cubans, the closest precedent was the deportation to Eswatini in July 2025, where Cuban Roberto Mosquera del Peral spent months in a maximum-security prison without formal charges.
In February 2026, a federal judge in Massachusettsruled the policy of deporting individuals to third countries without prior notification or the opportunity to appeal the transfer illegal, although the ruling was temporarily stayed.
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