{"id":14648,"date":"2026-01-10T06:15:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T06:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/14648\/"},"modified":"2026-01-10T06:15:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T06:15:25","slug":"u-s-deportations-are-remaking-daily-life-in-ghana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/14648\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Deportations Are Remaking Daily Life in Ghana"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story was supported<\/a> by the Pulitzer Center. Capital B has chosen to use first names for some sources due to security concerns.<\/p>\n

Photos by Adam Mahoney except where noted.<\/p>\n

GREATER ACCRA REGION, Ghana \u2014 About an hour and a half east of Ghana\u2019s capital city, Gladys Adgy stood outside a stand in Kpone waiting for an order of grilled tilapia.<\/p>\n

\u200bAdgy watched the screen of her cracked smartphone pulse with messages from a friend and fellow-Ghanaian in New York City. She wanted to trade places with him and migrate to the U.S. for a steady job and better housing. But the American dream he described sounded increasingly disturbing. Though he had a green card, he told her that he and his family were living in hiding. They were afraid to go outside or answer a knock on the door, lest federal agents deport them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u200bAdgy and her friend live on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but they and thousands more West Africans are struggling under the Trump administration\u2019s aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. In the U.S., many Ghanaians with legal status are hunkering down in fear, as masked agents conduct televised raids in major U.S. cities. While in Ghana, many are trying to figure out how to carry out their migration plans in the new, hostile climate.<\/p>\n

Because of a new deportation pact between Ghana and the U.S., it\u2019s not just U.S. immigration officials that West Africans fear.\u00a0 Ghana has agreed to accept and detain deportees from the U.S. \u2014 even if they are not Ghanaian citizens and even in cases where migrants have already won legal protection.<\/p>\n

\u200bGhanaian leaders have defended the deal in the language of Pan-Africanism \u2014 a global movement to build unity, solidarity, and liberation for people of African descent everywhere \u2014 saying they\u2019re taking the migrants to protect them from the U.S. detention system. At the same time, the government has quietly celebrated the agreement because it will lower visa restrictions for Ghanaians traveling to the U.S. and relax U.S. tariffs on the country.<\/p>\n

\u200bCritics say the pact is unconstitutional and the conditions of detention often do not meet standards of international law.<\/p>\n

\u200b\u201cGhana has effectively become a conveyor belt for U.S. deportations, acting as an instrument of the U.S. government in this regard,\u201d said Ghanaian lawyer and activist Oliver Barker-Vormawor.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Every night, anywhere between five and nine people sleep in this home in Adgy\u2019s neighborhood.<\/p>\n

\u200bA new Capital B analysis found deportations of people from African nations are on pace to nearly triple compared to the Biden years, and the number of arrests and people held in U.S. detention centers have more than doubled this year.<\/p>\n

\u200bMore than 60% of African deportees this year have not been convicted of a crime, our analysis of data provided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement found.<\/p>\n

\u200bIn November, Capital B spent time in three regions of Ghana speaking with residents wishing to immigrate to the U.S., people recently deported from the U.S., and lawyers representing deportees.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u200bOne person caught in this international dragnet spun by the United States and Ghana is Martin Berchie.<\/p>\n

\u200bIn early October, he boarded a plane in Minnesota bound for Ghana, shackled.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u200bBerchie came to the U.S. on a student visa in 2018 to complete college, but his visa expired the following year. In 2021, he was convicted of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, a misdemeanor. He was ordered deported after serving his sentence, but ICE released him in 2022 when Ghana did not issue did not issue the paperwork that would allow ICE to put him on a deportation flight. Since then, he has gotten married, started working in an IT job, and purchased a home. <\/p>\n

During a routine immigration check in August, ICE arrested him. A federal judge recommended his release. But ICE obtained travel documents from the Ghanaian government anyway.<\/p>\n

\u200bIn a court filing, Berchie claimed ICE agents put his name on a travel document previously used for another deportee. Once back in Ghana, he said ICE officials abandoned him at the airport, and Ghanaian immigration officials then rejected his return because of paperwork issues.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The majority of Ghanaians are micro entrepreneurs, selling food and items at markets for a few dollars a day. <\/p>\n

\u200bIt was \u201cakin to pushing Berchie out of a helicopter with a parachute,\u201d his lawyer Nico Ratkowski wrote in the legal filing. Eventually, Ghana officials \u201chad no other choice\u201d but to process Berchie into Ghana, where he is now \u201clying low,\u201d he said during a phone call with Capital B.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u200bHe is not alone. Across market stalls, law offices, and dim one-room apartments, people keep circling back to the thought of strangers \u2014 or themselves \u2014 sent off on unmarked flights, then locked away in barracks, and dragged across the floor<\/a> by military personnel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Everywhere, lives are being reordered around it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Camps, courts, and quiet transfers\u00a0<\/p>\n

At one military camp outside the capital, deportees described being herded into a dusty, unclean hall with bare mattresses, no bedding, and no nearby toilets or running water. In another case, when lawyers from Barker-Vormawor\u2019s firm arrived to challenge the removals, they watched as officers spent nearly an hour trying to wrench a grandmother out of a hotel lobby to deport her to a country she had not been to since a young child; at one point she clung to his leg while they dragged her across the tile toward a waiting van, gasping for air as he dug through her bag for an inhaler during an asthma attack.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"U.S. military officials seen at the Bundase Training Camp (also referred to as Dema Camp) in 2018.\u00a0 (Petty Officer 2nd Class Douglas Parker\/U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa)<\/p>\n

Sometime around then, another deported woman attempted to take her own life, according to attorney Ana Dionne-Lanier. Dionne-Lanier\u2019s own client, who was held in the same camp, reported that the incident occurred while detainees were being interviewed by officials attempting to remove them to their countries of origin.<\/p>\n

Dionne-Lanier\u2019s client \u2014 who had previously won a legal right to stay in the U.S. due to a credible fear of torture \u2014 was recently removed from the Ghanaian camp and flown back to his home country, where he is now hiding at a friend\u2019s house to escape the persecution he originally fled.<\/p>\n

Under the deportation agreement between Ghana and the U.S., Ghana is aiding America in deporting West Africans after their home countries, like Nigeria and Togo, have refused to take them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

People \u2014 many of whom have lived in the U.S. for decades and have already won asylum or other protection \u2014 are flown to Ghana, held in military camps and guarded hotels, and in many cases pushed onward to countries they fled years ago, despite court orders meant to shield them from torture or persecution. As of late November, over 40 West African deportees had moved throughout Ghana, in addition to over 200 Ghanaian deportees.<\/p>\n

Capital B reached out to Ghana\u2019s Immigration Service and the office of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, but did not receive a response.<\/p>\n

For Nana Kwesi Osei Bonsu, a land and environmental defender now seeking asylum in Ohio, Ghana is not the \u201csafe\u201d country U.S. officials describe. A seventh-generation descendant of the Indigenous peoples of Ghana \u2014 the Ashanti Empire \u2014 he built a nonprofit to protect his community\u2019s ancestral lands from powerful encroachers<\/a>, he said. In return, he said, he was criminalized, tortured in police custody, and forced to flee.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ghanaian government has actually failed to protect some of its own citizens,\u201d he said. \u201cSo what credibility will they have to protect other countries\u2019 nationals through these agreements?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese agreements make African governments partners in the Trump administration\u2019s horrifying violations of immigrants\u2019 human rights,\u201d said Allan Ngari, Africa advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. The African governments, he said, were potentially \u201cviolating international law.\u201d U.S. and international law prohibits<\/a> the government from returning individuals to places where their life or freedom would be threatened.<\/p>\n

\"\"Oliver Barker-Vormawor said most Ghanaians don\u2019t understand the severity of Trump\u2019s deportation plans.<\/p>\n

After fleeing to the U.S., Osei Bonsu was paroled into the country as an asylum seeker with work authorization. But he is currently in ongoing removal proceedings and forced to regularly check in with ICE.<\/p>\n

From the front seat of his car in Cleveland, where he drives Uber and Lyft up to 15 hours a day and often sleeps between shifts, he juggles calls with lawyers in Ghana and prepares filings for U.S. immigration court. He is caught between two governments: one that once tortured him and another that could still send him back.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat brought me to the United States is the rise of authoritarianism and persecution,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the price that came with [immigrating to the U.S.] has been the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

On social media and in Ghana\u2019s streets and markets, meanwhile, public sentiment about the agreement is largely negative. Not due to concerns of human rights violations like advocates have argued, but because of Trump\u2019s talk of only \u201ccriminals\u201d and \u201cbad people\u201d being removed. The assumption is that these deportees, including the record-number of Ghanaians deported this year, must be violent and will bring crime to the nation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, the majority of deportees convicted of crimes were arrested for financial crimes such as check forgery or selling stolen or counterfeit goods, according to Capital B\u2019s analysis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou would think that [our own economic struggles] would create some sort of empathy for persons who are caught up in this situation,\u201d said Barker-Vormawor. \u201cBut there is no sense of solidarity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barker-Vormawor\u2019s organization, Democracy Hub, has sued the Ghanaian government, alleging that the agreement violates Ghana\u2019s constitution. The case is being heard before the Ghanaian Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

This is not the first such deportation deal: Ghana previously signed at least two controversial removal arrangements with Washington. Under the Obama administration in 2016, Ghana agreed<\/a> to receive two Yemeni men released from Guant\u00e1namo Bay and then deported them, and two years later it entered another deal to take a backlog<\/a> of thousands of Ghanaians facing deportation in exchange for lifting U.S. visa sanctions.<\/p>\n

Despite the uptick during this second Trump administration, U.S. policies show clear racial disparities: During the Biden administration, Black migrants were deported at a rate four times<\/a> more often than their numbers would suggest.<\/p>\n

Ghanaian officials \u201care so blinded by this need to be in the good books of the U.S. that we haven\u2019t even reckoned with the toxic, racialized undertones of these removals,\u201d Barker-Vormawor said.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Children play soccer in Accra as women make their way home. The majority of youth in Ghana report wanting to migrate from the country.<\/p>\n

When Pan-Africanism meets U.S. deportation policy<\/p>\n

As a child, Richard Tetteh Martey said he would watch planes trace paths across the sky and imagine a \u201cbetter future out there,\u201d somewhere the system worked in ways he had only heard about from relatives abroad. But today, for the 27-year-old Ghanaian and recent college graduate in mechanical engineering, these dreams and the deportation deal sit alongside another set of choices that have reshaped Ghana\u2019s place in the Black imagination.<\/p>\n

Launched in 2019, Ghana\u2019s \u201cYear of Return<\/a>\u201d campaign invited people of African descent, especially Black Americans, to visit and settle in the country as a way to reconnect with the continent and boost tourism and investment. Officials have celebrated its success: Hundreds of thousands of visitors arrived that year and thousands of Black Americans are estimated to have relocated permanently, many of them concentrating in Accra and nearby coastal areas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the influx of relatively wealthier diaspora residents has collided with long-standing housing shortages and speculative real estate development, sharply raising prices and displacing lower-income Ghanaians from central Accra.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Osu, a popular neighborhood in Accra for Americans, monthly rental prices have jumped to $1,100 \u2014 almost five times the regional average monthly income of $245.<\/p>\n

In central Accra, monthly rental prices have jumped to $1,100 \u2014 almost five times the regional average income of $245 per month. <\/p>\n

In the vegan caf\u00e9 where Tetteh Martey works, he said most customers can now afford things he cannot: the smoothies he blends and the new condos across the street. For Tetteh Martey, it feels like a one-way arrangement: Ghana opened its doors, rolled out the red carpet, and rebranded neighborhoods for diaspora investors, while the U.S. is tightening its borders and expelling other Black migrants back the same route.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is quite concerning that we are welcoming people from the U.S. into our home, and they don\u2019t want to reciprocate,\u201d he said. \u201cSomeone with my qualifications from America can live here comfortably; I cannot.<\/p>\n

From Accra to the Bronx, Ghanaians are searching for safety<\/p>\n

William Yirenkyi understands how easily he could have been on those planes he has watched land from the U.S. with handcuffed migrants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2013, he flew from Accra to Mexico City on a valid visa, then on to Tijuana, where he walked to the port of entry and told U.S. officers he wanted to come in. They took his belt, his phone, his fingerprints, and gave him a paper bracelet and a mat on the floor of a fluorescent\u2011lit room. After nearly a month in detention, they paroled him into the country with one year to stay, but no right to work and no guarantee his case would end in his favor.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would say 90% of the people want to leave,\u201d Yirenkyi said flatly. (A recent survey found that two-thirds of people<\/a>in the country want to migrate from Ghana.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cNot because of anything but because of socioeconomic conditions. No jobs, health care system, our roads, housing deficit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In New Jersey, he found a small Ghanaian community, a brief off\u2011the\u2011books job in a dollar store owned by Pakistani immigrants, and started spending long evenings with friends. But in El Paso, Texas, where he moved to live with his white American fianc\u00e9e, the walls closed in. Border Patrol trucks rolled past their subdivision at night. Without papers, he couldn\u2019t take steady work or send money home. Days collapsed into nothing. After a year and a half, the relationship had turned volatile \u2014 sometimes abusive, he said \u2014 and the only choice he felt he controlled was to leave. His \u201cself\u2011deportation\u201d in early 2015 triggered a 10\u2011year reentry ban that lasted long after the shame of returning home with nothing.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes I feel my life is at risk here because of the lack of opportunity,\u201d Yirenkyi said. His options are becoming increasingly limited after he said a group of Ghanaian police officers attacked him last year. He recently petitioned<\/a> the country\u2019s human rights office to investigate the nation\u2019s police force.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there are a lot of opportunities in America, but it is dehumanizing that these are my only options,\u201d he said from a coffee shop in Accra while wearing an American flag T-shirt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From his new vantage point, he said, he understands the U.S. government\u2019s inclination to clamp down on immigration, but what he cannot accept is deportation to places where people fear harm.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody has the right to safety,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But these days, safety is hard to find for Ghanaians, no matter where they are.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In New Jersey, Raymond is still stuck in his apartment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Ohio, Osei Bonsu is spending his nights in a parked car drafting legal briefs to defend the burial grounds of his ancestors back in Ghana.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Kpone, Adgy is still dreaming of America while living on a few dollars a day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And somewhere in Accra, Berchie is suspended between two countries that have both claimed they cannot keep him.<\/p>\n

In the split-screen between welcome and removal, Ghana stands as both haven and holding pen, said the lawyer, Barker-Vormawor \u2014 \u201ca mirror for the world\u2019s uneven humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Years after illegally immigrating to the U.S. and failing to find a footing, William Yirenkyi still holds the country in the highest regard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Capital B has chosen to use first names for some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[9720,1748,79,1750,1747],"class_list":{"0":"post-14648","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ghana","8":"tag-black-immigrants","9":"tag-deportation","10":"tag-ghana","11":"tag-ice","12":"tag-immigration"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}