After they were captured by ICE, after they were booked for deportation proceedings from the US, and after they were put on a plane bound for the Ghanaian capital of Accra, the deportees arrived at what would be their temporary ‘home’ in Ghana: the Bundase Military Camp.
At the camp, an active military training base just outside Accra, none of the deportees had access to running water or bedding, women were denied sanitary products, and those who were sick were denied healthcare, according to Oliver Barker-Vormawor, a lawyer and the convener of Democracy Hub, a Ghanaian civil society organisation, who is representing 11 of the deportees in court. “The place was not designed to keep humans,” said Barker-Vormawor of the conditions the deportees told him they were held in.
Barker-Vormawore believes 42 deportees have arrived in Accra from the US in groups of around 10 to 15 over the past few weeks, after Ghana joined a growing list of African countries, including Eswatini, Rwanda and Uganda, to controversially agree to take in people deported by the US’s increasingly far-right-leaning government. The lawyer said the Ghanaian government’s secrecy makes it difficult to establish the exact number of arrivals.
