The masked police officers burst into Ahmed Soliman's hotel room in Equatorial Guinea and dragged him and two dozen other US deportees outside, guns drawn, to deliver a message: go home.
"I have police officers yanking on my neck, trying to throw me on the ground, I have officers elbowing me in my back," Soliman, 30, told AFP of the incident, which occurred two weeks ago.
"Machine guns pointed at our faces, all this just so that they can tell us they're tired of us here in this country," he recalled, saying he and four others were handcuffed and hit by police, in an incident confirmed by two other deportees.
Authorities are ratcheting up pressure on deportees held at the hotel, which has become a dumping ground for expelled US immigrants, including Soliman, who arrived in April, said AFP.
The deportees say they're facing verbal and physical abuse from police, meagre rations and constantly being pushed to return home.
The authoritarian petro-state in central Africa has become a key transit point in President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, which involves shipping people that the United States can't legally send home to "third countries" like Equatorial Guinea instead.
As their stay at the hotel, under watch from armed guards, drags on for months, authorities are getting impatient, deportees told AFP. A local lawyer also confirmed that deportees are facing pressure to return to their home countries.
"Anytime a problem happens, anytime we're asking for our rights for something, they say, 'Hey, if you don't like it, go back to your country,'" Soliman, who had lived in the United States since he was three and fears returning to his native Egypt because he is gay, told AFP.
The deportees cannot claim asylum in Equatorial Guinea.
But they say they can't leave, because they fear for their lives in their home countries -- and because they were deported without passports.
Soliman said authorities are pressuring him to accept a government-issued travel document instead.
Washington has expelled at least 50 people, mostly Africans, to Equatorial Guinea since November.
Twenty-seven remain in the hotel as Equatorial Guinea has deported people to their home countries, or onward to "fourth" countries.
- 'They're trying to intimidate you' -
At the hotel, the deportees are held on the premises by armed guards.
"They threaten you each and every day," said another deportee, who gave her first name, Petagaye, and has been held in the hotel since June.
"They tell you, 'oh, you need to go back to your country'. Or they tell you, 'oh, just kill yourself, because America don't care'," the 35-year-old said.
Deportees used to be able to walk around the hotel grounds, and sometimes get a police escort to a nearby corner store -- often in exchange for a few dollars -- but that too has seen a crackdown, a deportee who gave the name Him, a pseudonym, told AFP.
"They're trying to intimidate you," said Him, who fled what is now Eritrea during that country's war for independence from Ethiopia, and arrived in the United States as a refugee when he was 13.
"Even though you know you could go back and get killed, even though you ran away from a country and proved it in a federal court of law that we can't go back," said Him, 47.
Neither the US State Department nor Equatorial Guinea's national security minister responded to a request for comment.
- Ebola scare -
In July, deportees were sent into a panic when a guard told them an Ebola patient was being housed in the hotel.
Videos shared with AFP showed men in hazmat suits walking through the building.
Authorities have not commented on the incident and Equatorial Guinea has not reported any Ebola cases.
The three deportees interviewed by AFP had been in the United States since they were children, and spoke with American accents.
All three had won deportation protections preventing them from being sent to their home countries after judges found their lives would be in danger.
Under previous administrations, people with such protections, though legally weaker than asylum, have been allowed to legally work and live in the United States.
The Trump administration has argued that it can still deport people with such protections, as long as it doesn't send them to their home country.
A lawsuit was filed in June at the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, the continent's top human rights body, to try to halt US deportations to Equatorial Guinea.
For now, the deportations continue: 10 more people arrived on July 30, US and local lawyers said.
