Ghana

What has happened

No agreement between the United States and Ghana has been published. Third Country Deportation Watch, the joint project of Human Rights First and Refugees International, records that the two governments exchanged diplomatic notes and a memorandum of understanding, and that Ghana agreed to receive West African nationals who could enter visa-free for ninety days under the protocol of the Economic Community of West African States. Ghana states that it received no payment. Its Minister for Foreign Affairs, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, put the position this way: “Ghana has not received and does not seek any financial compensation or material benefit in relation to this understanding.” Human Rights First and Refugees International record separately that the Ghana agreement is among those not yet disclosed to the United States Congress under the Case-Zablocki Act, which requires the text of an international agreement to be given to Congress within sixty days of entry into force.

Third Country Deportation Watch records five confirmed flights from the United States to Ghana carrying more than one hundred people who were nationals of neither country, many of them holding a grant of withholding of removal or of protection under the Convention against Torture from a United States immigration judge. The dated detail is as follows. On September 5, 2025, fourteen people arrived, ten men and four women, holding the nationalities of Nigeria, the Gambia, Togo, Mali and Liberia; ten of the fourteen held such a grant. Further flights carrying third country nationals arrived on September 11 and September 18, 2025. On October 13, 2025, seventeen people arrived, eight of whom Ghana removed onward the same day. On November 7, 2025, nineteen West African nationals arrived. Further flights followed in April, May and June 2026. On July 31, 2026, more than thirty people arrived, nationals of Nigeria, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Niger, and Third Country Deportation Watch records that all of them held protection from removal to their home countries.

On the way. According to court filings in D.A. v. Noem, the fourteen people on the September 5 flight were taken from a United States detention center in the middle of the night and put onto a military cargo plane without being told where they were going and without access to their attorneys. Four men who resisted boarding were placed in straitjackets. Once the plane was in the air, United States agents told them they would be taken first to Ghana and then to their countries of origin. One Nigerian man who held a grant of withholding of removal reported what he was told when he objected: “I told the officers repeatedly that I was afraid for my life. He told me that he didn’t care, and that when we got to Ghana we would then go to our respective countries of origin.” Filings in the Massachusetts case record that before the November flight a man who had won withholding of removal and had a heart condition protested that Ghana would return him to persecution in the Gambia, and was tackled by immigration officers and placed in a straitjacket.

On arrival. The Global Detention Project reported on October 21, 2025 that people transferred to Ghana were held at the Bundase Training Camp, also called Dema Camp, a Ghanaian military facility, and quoted one of them: “Conditions are horrible at Dema Camp…no reliable power, Internet, or running water.” The same report records mosquitoes carrying malaria and unsanitary drinking water, and that internet access was later cut off entirely. Court filings record limited ability to contact family members and attorneys. Some people were held for five days at the airport in Accra without access to a telephone, a shower or clean clothes. Those on the November flight were taken to a guarded hotel and told by Ghanaian immigration officers that they would be sent back to their countries of origin; on November 11, 2025 armed Ghanaian authorities moved them from the hotel to a detention camp. Ghana’s foreign minister had initially promised the transferred West Africans access to what he called “safe haven.”

This is not the first time. The United States Department of State’s country reports on human rights practices in Ghana have raised arbitrary detention year after year, and record that in 2023 Ghana forcibly deported around 1,200 Burkinabe people, mostly women and children, without allowing them to claim asylum. The United Nations refugee agency said that operation “amounts to a violation of the non-refoulement principle,” and the same report lists refoulement of refugees to a country where they would face torture or persecution among its findings for that year.

Around the transfers ran a sequence of economic measures. In July 2025 the United States imposed visa restrictions on Ghanaians seeking non-immigrant visas, affecting nearly ten thousand Ghanaian students in the United States. On August 1, 2025 it added fifteen percent tariffs on Ghanaian exports. On September 5, 2025, the day of the first transfer flight, the President signed an executive order allowing Ghana a possible exemption from new tariffs if it signed trade and security agreements. A week later, after Ghana’s foreign minister announced that the country would accept another forty transferees, the United States lifted the visa restrictions and restored five-year multiple-entry visas. The tariff exemptions took effect on November 13, 2025. By January 2026 the State Department had paused all immigrant visa issuance to applicants from Ghana, among other African countries.

What the assurance actually said

United States officials said they had received diplomatic assurances that Ghana would not send transferred people to countries where they might face persecution or torture, and refused to make those assurances public. One document about the arrangement has been forced into public view by a federal court order: a declaration by a State Department Africa bureau official dated September 13, 2025, several days before Ghana removed the first group to Togo. It states that “the U.S. government received diplomatic assurances from the Government of Ghana, communicated to the U.S. government by diplomatic note,” and that the United States has not “made any additional efforts” to protect the people it transferred to Ghana from refoulement.

On February 25, 2026 the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, in D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security, declared the third-country removal policy unlawful and set it aside. On the assurances specifically the court wrote that the policy “fails to satisfy due process for a raft of reasons, not least of which is that nobody really knows anything about these purported ‘assurances.’ Whom do they cover? What do they cover? Why has the Government deemed them credible? How can anyone even know for certain that they exist? These are basic questions that the Constitution permits a person to ask before the Government takes away their last and only lifeline.” The court held that for a diplomatic assurance about the Convention against Torture to mean anything it would have to be individualized and specific to the case rather than to the country. The decision has been appealed and is stayed while the litigation continues.

What an assurance is, when one may lawfully be relied on, and why serious people disagree about whether the practice can be made safe, are set out in the Coalition’s project on the subject. Ghana is the clearest illustration in the record of the gap the argument is about: an assurance was given, and the removals happened anyway.

The diplomatic assurances project. What the courts have held about assurances.

What the record says about Ghana itself

The rest of this page treats Ghana as a route: who was sent here, how quickly they were moved on, and what can be done in the days before that happens. This section is about Ghana as a place. It matters because for some people the danger is not only at the end of the journey, and because the United States chose Ghana while its own government was publishing findings about what happens to people here.

Almost everything below is the United States government’s own reporting.

Ghana had already been recorded returning people to danger

Two years before the first transfer flight landed in Accra, the United States Department of State recorded that Ghana had carried out a mass forced return. In July 2023, it reported, Ghanaian authorities conducted a ten-day operation to forcibly repatriate approximately 1,200 people to Burkina Faso, more than eighty percent of them women and children. The United Nations refugee agency said the operation “amounts to a violation of the non-refoulement principle.” Those expelled were not able to claim asylum because of a delay in the regional registration process, and many accounts on the ground indicated that the operation targeted members of the Fulbe community.

Torture and ill-treatment by officials

The word torture appears in the 2022 summary of significant issues and not in the 2023 one, which lists cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment instead. The body of both reports uses the same formula about police beating and otherwise abusing people.

The last entry above is worth separating from the others. Most accounts of police violence describe force that was excessive. That one describes injury inflicted for a stated purpose, obtaining a confession, which is the first purpose named in article 1 of the Convention against Torture.

What Ghana’s own system does not yet have

In September and October 2025 the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights carried out an official mission to Ghana. Its delegation included the chair of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture in Africa and the Special Rapporteur on Prisons, Conditions of Detention and Policing. It met the Interior Ministry, the Attorney-General, the Police Service, the national human rights commission and civil society organizations, and it visited detention facilities.

The Coalition has not been able to establish whether that committee was in fact established by January 2026. Anyone who knows is invited to say so.

The assessment most favorable to Ghana, and what it still says

Not every official source points the same way, and the one that points the other way should be read rather than left out.

The United Kingdom Home Office, in its country policy note on actors of protection in Ghana of March 31, 2025, concludes that the state is both willing and able to provide sufficient protection to people who fear non-state actors, and that violations by the security forces are not commonplace measured against the size of those forces and of the population.

Two things about that conclusion matter here. The first is which question it answers. It is an assessment of whether Ghana can protect a person from harm by others. It is not an assessment of whether officials themselves inflict harm, which is the question this section is about. The second is that the same document records repression of and excessive force at protests, ill-treatment or torture of detainees, assaults, and arbitrary arrest and detention; that officers responsible for misconduct are rarely held to account; that the police rarely release the results of internal investigations; and that there is no independent oversight body for the police.

On oversight, in other words, the most favorable official assessment and the African Commission agree.

If you are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex

At least one person transferred to Ghana held United States protection granted because of his sexuality. That raises a question this page should state plainly rather than leave implied.

The United States Department of State recorded, in both 2022 and 2023, credible reports of laws criminalizing consensual same-sex sexual conduct between adults, although not fully enforced, alongside crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or intersex people. The 2024 report records the offence in use: in January an individual accused of unnatural carnal knowledge was held by police beyond the allowable forty-eight hours without evidence, moved between police stations and threatened with court proceedings, before the case was abandoned for lack of evidence.

A further bill, the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values bill, would go considerably further, imposing prison terms on people who identify as LGBTI. It passed Parliament in 2024, lapsed when the then president declined to sign it, and was reintroduced in March 2025. As of the end of 2025 it had not been passed, and it is not law. This page will record it if that changes.

What this does and does not establish

These are country conditions. They describe a pattern rather than a prediction about any particular person, and the Coalition does not tell anyone what their case is worth.

The Coalition has found no evidence that Ghana operates a centrally directed program of torture. What the official record shows is repeated documented physical abuse by police and by soldiers, a mass forced return that the United Nations refugee agency called a violation of non-refoulement, and, on the account of the African Commission and of the United Kingdom Home Office alike, no independent body able to hold the police to account.

Whether any of that matters in a particular case is a question for a court or a treaty body, and the routes to both are set out further down this page.

Why speed is the whole problem here

Read against the record above, the practical situation in Ghana is different from the one in most receiving countries, and the difference decides which routes are worth anything.

In some countries the harm is that people are held for a long time without charge. The remedies that answer that harm can afford to be slow, because the person is still there when they arrive. In Ghana the reported harm has usually been the opposite: people have been moved on within hours or days, in one case the same day they landed, to the country they were found to be at risk in. A complaint that takes three weeks to be registered is a complaint that arrives after the flight.

Two things follow, and they are the reason this page is ordered the way it is. The first is that telling someone outside Ghana where you are matters more than anything else on this page, because a person who is moved on can still be found and helped afterward if somebody knows they arrived. The second is that the fastest formal route in Ghana is not a domestic one. It is the regional court, which takes applications from individuals directly and does not require a person to go through the national courts first. That is set out below.

The question only you can answer

The first hours and days

Who is reachable in Ghana

Which complaint routes are open

What is already before the courts

In the United States: D.A. v. Noem. A challenge brought in the federal district court in the District of Columbia on behalf of people transferred on the September 5 flight. The judge held that she lacked jurisdiction to order the Ghanaian government to do anything, and condemned the transfers in terms worth quoting at length, because they are a United States court’s own description of the practice: “In recent months…authorities have rounded up, often at night and with little or no notice, men, women, and children being held in detention facilities, hastily put them on planes and transferred them to other countries, where they have no connections, do not speak the language, and are unable to contact family or counsel…Defendants’ actions in this case appear to be taken in disregard of or despite its obligations to provide individuals present in the United States with due process and to treat even those who are subject to removal humanely. These actions also appear to be part of a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.” The court further found that people were transported to Ghana “with no notice or opportunity to challenge that removal, under what appears to be a hasty and unwritten agreement with Ghana, which has indicated its intention to return Plaintiffs to their home countries where Defendants agree they will almost certainly be persecuted.”

In the United States: D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security. The federal district court in Massachusetts enjoined third-country removals of people under final orders without notice or an opportunity to raise a fear claim. The Supreme Court stayed that injunction in June 2025, and the removals to Ghana took place while the stay was in force. On February 25, 2026 the same court declared the third-country removal policy unlawful and set it aside, holding that the Department cannot remove a person under a final order to a country not designated in the removal proceedings without meaningful notice and a genuine opportunity to seek protection. It rejected the argument that the Department may transfer people to what it called “so-called ‘third countries'” so long as it lacks specific prior knowledge that harm awaits them, and answered it in four words: “It is not fine, nor is it legal.” The decision has been appealed and is stayed while the litigation continues.

In Ghana. Ghanaian lawyers brought a suit in September 2025 challenging the conditions of detention in the military camp and seeking to prevent the deportations. In October 2025 the Ghanaian organization Democracy Hub filed a suit in the Supreme Court of Ghana arguing that accepting the transfers violates the Ghanaian Constitution, Ghana’s non-refoulement obligations under international law, and the letter and spirit of the ECOWAS protocol; the constitutional argument rests on article 75 of the 1992 Constitution, which requires that an international agreement executed by the President be ratified by Parliament before it takes effect. Democracy Hub also filed an information request in the same month, asking the government to disclose the terms of the agreement with the United States, the number and countries of origin of the people transferred, and how they were treated in Ghana, including their removal to other countries.

At the regional court. On June 29, 2026, Merton and Everett LLP, Cornell Law School’s Transnational Disputes Clinic and the Global Strategic Litigation Council filed an application at the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice in Abuja on behalf of twenty-seven of at least sixty people transferred to Ghana since September 2025. The application alleges that Ghana wrongly relied on a regional treaty designed to facilitate the movement of West African citizens in order to detain and remove people who had already been recognized in the United States as needing international protection, and that in doing so it breached its non-refoulement obligations. It asks the Court to order disclosure of the terms of the arrangement, to block Ghana from accepting further transfers under it, and to award at least one hundred thousand United States dollars per person in compensation, along with other reparations. Oliver Barker-Vormawor, senior partner at Merton and Everett, put the principle at issue this way: “No person should be returned to a place where they face persecution, torture or serious threats to their dignity and safety.”

At the United Nations. Lawyers in the United States sent a complaint to the UN Committee against Torture concerning Ghana’s removal of people to places where, in the words of the complaint, “there are substantial grounds for believing that they would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

All of this matters to a reader of this page for one practical reason. A claim that named lawyers have already put before named courts, on behalf of named applicants, is a claim that a lawyer, a family member or the person concerned can point to without having to construct it from nothing.

Sources

Everything on this page comes from something below. The court filings are records of United States federal courts. The reporting is linked to the outlet that published it rather than copied here. Where a source could not be opened or did not state a detail, the page says so above instead of guessing.

Conditions in Ghana. United States Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Ghana. These are United States government works and carry no copyright under 17 U.S.C. section 105, so the Coalition hosts copies of them, which is the reason the citations above open here rather than on a government server. The 2022 report, twenty-eight pages, and the 2023 report, thirty-four pages. The official pages remain at the Department of State for 2022, 2023 and 2024. Amnesty International Report 2022/23, Ghana, and Amnesty’s Ghana entry covering 2025. African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, promotion mission to Ghana, 29 September to 2 October 2025, and its press statement at the close of the mission. United Kingdom Home Office, country policy and information note on actors of protection in Ghana, March 31, 2025. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, national documentation package for Ghana, updated January 30, 2026.

The record of the transfers. Third Country Deportation Watch, Ghana page, the joint project of Human Rights First and Refugees International, last updated August 15, 2026, which is the source of the flight dates, the numbers, and most of the individual accounts. Global Detention Project, October 21, 2025, on the Bundase military camp and the expulsions into Togo.

Court records. The opinion in D.A. v. Noem and its docket, including the accounts of the flight. The State Department declaration of September 13, 2025 on the diplomatic assurances. Filing on limited contact with family and counsel. In the Massachusetts case: the complaint, the account of the November flight, the accounts of those transferred, one grant of withholding of removal, the decision of February 25, 2026, and the appeal docket. Human Rights First’s case page for D.V.D. v. DHS.

The arrangement. The Washington Post, September 16, 2025, that no public agreement exists. Business Insider Africa, on the reliance on the ECOWAS free movement protocol. PBS NewsHour, on Ghana’s claim to have received no payment. The foreign minister’s “safe haven” statement and his announcement that Ghana would accept another forty people. JURIST, November 11, 2025, on article 75 of Ghana’s Constitution.

What happened to people afterward. NBC News on the November flight. NBC Washington’s investigation into the removal of the nurse from Maryland; a video of her being dragged is public, and the Coalition links the investigation that examined it rather than the footage itself. Reuters, January 16, 2026. The New Yorker, December 1, 2025. In These Times and WBUR, December 2, 2025, on the woman who attempted suicide in the camp.

Country conditions and the surrounding measures. United States Department of State country reports on human rights practices in Ghana for 2023 and 2022, including the 2023 removal of around 1,200 Burkinabe people. Prism on the visa restrictions. GhanaWeb on the tariffs and the executive order modifying them. Modern Ghana and Ecofin Agency on the lifting of the visa restrictions, News Ghana on the exemptions, and the State Department on the later pause in immigrant visa issuance.

The regional case. The Africa Report and Al Jazeera, June 30, 2026.