ICE Sent a Gay Brazilian Man to Equatorial Guinea. Now He’s Gone Silent.

Hotel Bamy in Equatorial Guinea is not a prison, but Pietro Graza hasn’t been able to leave for weeks. He has been held captive in the semi-abandoned luxury hotel in Malabo, the former capital city, after being deported from Arizona despite legally seeking protections in the United States for protection against torture in his home country of Brazil. 

Graza was almost killed by police partly because he is a gay man, and immigrated to the states where he sought asylum. But in 2024, he was detained by federal agents and held in a Florida detention camp before a transfer to Eloy Detention Center. He was then flown to Liberia, and finally moved to the Hotel Bamy in Equatorial Guinea. He has no ties to the country or the continent.

Now he and about a dozen other men and women are trapped in legal limbo. He and the others were sent, in chains, to the small, oil-rich Central African petrostate, which has been run for more than four decades by one of the world's most repressive governments.

While homosexuality is not illegal in Equatorial Guinea, repression and persecution of the queer community is common, and the state's willingness to impose harsh or extralegal penalties makes the situation even more dangerous. According to a 2023 State Department Country Report on Equatorial Guinea, “Security forces reportedly subjected LGBTQI+ individuals to violence, including rape and other sexual violence, within the military and in jails and prisons.”

LOOKOUT spoke to Graza via WhatsApp audio messages in Spanish, as well as by video call with assistance from a Portuguese interpreter.

His story illustrates a growing trend in U.S. immigration enforcement in which, if the federal government can't deport someone to their home country because they've been granted protection or because the government of the home country is unwilling to accept them, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been finding other places to deport them to: what's referred to as “third-country deportations.” And for LGBTQ+ prisoners who legally can't be sent back to their home countries because of the possibility of death, torture or imprisonment, many of them end up back there anyway.

“Shoot him!”

According to Third Country Deportation Watch, the United States has agreements with at least 35 other countries and has deported more than 26,000 people to them since the start of the second Trump administration.

One common fear among those deported to third countries is that they could subsequently be deported back to their home country anyway — a process known as “chain refoulement” — where they could face persecution, imprisonment or death. Other serious concerns are language barriers, further criminalization, and a lack of connections or support people may find in these third countries.

Recent reporting from The Advocate raises concerns about specifically deporting LGBTQ+ people to countries where they could face criminalization, detention, torture or death. “Many of the countries on those [third country] lists have terrible track records when it comes to the rights of LGBTQ+ people,” said Kate O’Donnell, an attorney with the Tucson-based law firm Green Evans-Schroeder that represents both Graza and Ahmed Soliman — a gay man from Egypt who lived in Tucson, was captured by ICE and then deported to the hotel in Equatorial Guinea.

She said that Graza and Soliman face “de facto criminalization” and the potential for “terrible violence” because of their sexual identity.

Shortly after Graza arrived, Guinean officials told him they would facilitate his departure to Brazil. “That’s where my life is at risk,” Graza said.

On Sept. 8, armed police officers came to his room. They forced him to hand over his phone — his only lifeline to his lawyer — as well as the outside world. It was the second time in a few days that guards had moved against the detainees held at the hotel. Two nights earlier, police pointed assault rifles at two of the men during a dispute over an earlier round of confiscated phones, an incident first reported by Reuters.

One guard, pointing his rifle at one of the men, yelled, “Shoot him!”

“Several armed police officers came to my room this morning, around 8 o'clock, to take my phone because of that interview I gave on Sunday. The worst part is that my life is at risk, because my phone contains the contact details of various journalists who have interviewed me,” Graza said in the last voice message he was able to deliver to an attorney helping him on his case, using a borrowed phone.

Graza has been unreachable since.

The day after Graza and the others had their phones confiscated, Soliman was arrested. His attorney doesn't know what the charges against Soliman are or where he is now being held, and doesn't know if Graza, Soliman or others were beaten. But reportedly, some of the people held in the hotel have “cuts and bruises,” a person on the ground relayed to Soliman's attorney.

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From a supplement store in Brazil to a coma

Graza's account of what drove him from Brazil began, he said, with a small nutritional supplement store he opened around 2014. He also has a degree in teaching and specializes in literature. Running the store was, in his telling, meant to be a modest side hustle connected to his gym life.

Local police officers who controlled protection rackets in the area, he said, wanted him to pay into what shopkeepers referred to as a security fund — a collection extorted from business owners in exchange for “protection.” Graza refused, even though police told him he needed extra protection because he was gay.

Combined with what he described as their contempt for his sexual orientation, he said the officers began threatening him.

Graza said a cousin who was a police officer intervened and warned him that officers were fabricating a case to have him arrested for selling steroids. He hired a lawyer and was able to avoid arrest.

Weeks later, he said, two men on a motorcycle opened fire on him outside his home. He survived but lost a kidney, lost the use of much of his right arm and spent time in a coma. He underwent multiple surgeries and said he eventually recovered about 90% of his mobility. He said the shooting was never meaningfully investigated and claimed police erased the evidence in his case. A deputy separately demanded the equivalent of $4,000 in local currency to make the steroid case disappear. He refused to pay the bribe.

If he is sent back to Brazil, he said, the same officers he accused will know immediately.

“Because when I return to Brazil, the police will identify me,” he said. “They will know that I returned. They will know that I'm alive.”

“This goes against all human rights.”

Graza said he and his then-partner had traveled to the U.S. periodically for years before the shooting, including trips to Florida. After his recovery, still dealing with depression and panic attacks stemming from the attack, he applied for a student visa to study in the United States.

Soon after arriving, he said, he discovered his partner had been unfaithful. He decided to stay in the U.S. under his partner's household for the first year but eventually sought independence. But that was difficult, he said, because of the cost of the medications he needed for both his kidney condition and his deteriorating mental health. He said he hit a depressive low, had panic attacks and began using drugs. He was caught by police with methamphetamines. His visa had expired at that point, and after serving a short sentence, when he was due to be released, ICE was waiting for him.

Graza's asylum fight ran through two detention centers over nearly two years. ICE transferred him from Baker County Jail near Jacksonville, Florida, to Eloy Detention Center in Arizona in the summer of 2025.

He would spend roughly the next year at the Eloy Detention Center, while lawyers with the University of Miami's asylum clinic built a case using Brazilian court and police records — including documentation, he said, that the officers who had tried to kill him were later arrested on unrelated corruption charges.

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On April 16, 2026, an immigration judge ruled in his favor and gave him protected status under the Convention Against Torture, or CAT, agreement. But that didn't mean he was being released.

“ICE asked for three months to continue keeping me detained because they wanted to find a country to send me to,” he said. He said a government representative later asked him to sign a document agreeing to be sent to Liberia. On his lawyers' instructions, he refused to sign it.

Within days, he said, he was moved anyway.

Of the few dozen people forced onto the flight to Liberia, he said, three refused to comply — a Mexican man, a Cuban man and an Ethiopian man. Officers responded, he said, with a restraint he described as similar to a device called the WRAP, which has been criticized for inflicting torturous pain and causing asphyxiation. He called the restraint “brutal.”

“When we saw what they did to those three people, nobody else wanted to resist anymore, because it was so horrible, so violent,” he said. “How can someone do that? This goes against all human rights.”

What followed, he said, was a 36-hour flight, shackled the whole time.

ICE did not immediately respond to a detailed list of questions about Graza's treatment during his deportation.

“It was a situation of terror, because inside the plane we remained handcuffed,” he said. “It lasted 36 hours, and it was extremely uncomfortable. You really felt like human garbage.”

Messages gone quiet

When the deportation plane landed in Liberia, Graza and a small group refused to get off the plane, resisting the agents trying to force them out. That scuffle was documented by a bystander and reported on by The New York Times.

Ground crew and officials moved the group onto the tarmac to negotiate and described being pressured to accept resettlement in a third country.

“We were terrified,” he said.

Graza said he and the others who resisted were loaded back onto the same plane, with ICE agents saying they were being sent back to the United States.

When the plane landed again, they were in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea.

Still restrained, he said, hooded officers pulled the group from the plane and forced them into cars.

“We were handcuffed by our feet and hands,” Graza said. “Even so, the police with machine guns grabbed us and threw us into the cars, one person holding each of us. We were completely helpless. This was around midnight, behind the airport, everything dark. Don't you understand how terrifying that is? You just wanted to cry because of the desperation. The women were screaming. It was the worst scene I have ever witnessed in my life.”

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The convoy delivered Graza and the rest of the group to the decommissioned hotel in Malabo, where he remained until at least Sept. 9 — a building he insists, despite officials' repeated denials, functions as a detention center.

That is where Graza and others remain, now without any means to communicate and thousands of miles from anything — or anybody — they know.

WhatsApp messages sent to Graza since Sept. 9 have gone unread.