Six key points about an Arizona man's deportation to Equatorial Guinea

Here are six things to know about the story:

• Ahmed Soliman, who grew up in Phoenix, said he’s one of 17 deportees from the U.S. confined in the hotel-turned-prison in Equatorial Guinea, where he said living conditions are inhumane and deteriorating. Armed guards patrol the grounds of the Bamy Hotel, where Soliman — whose family moved to Arizona from Egypt when he was 4 — has been imprisoned since late April, despite having committed no crime in the African nation.
• Soliman fears at any moment he’ll be returned to his home country, where a U.S. immigration judge agreed last fall he’d likely face torture and death, due to his family’s politics and his identity as a gay man.
• Equatorial Guinea is among dozens of countries that have signed often-opaque “third-country removal” agreements with the Trump administration to accept U.S. deportees who can’t be deported to their home countries. But too often, those third countries send the deportees back home anyway, a violation of international law, attorneys say.
• U.S. deportees at Bamy Hotel get minimal hygiene products and three basic meals a day, but must purchase everything else, Soliman said. Recently, the imprisoned deportees haven't even been receiving the soap and toilet paper they were getting before, Soliman said. He believes the withholding of hygiene products amounts to retaliation, after a rights group filed a case against Equatorial Guinea, before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, decrying the treatment of deportees at the hotel.
• The hotel is now also holding a man with Ebola in quarantine one floor below the deportees, Soliman said. None of the deportees have received protective gear, he said: “You would never do this in a public hotel. They have no regard for us, for our health, for our safety.”
• "Once an alien leaves the United States, ICE is no longer responsible for tracking their location or activities outside the country," ICE spokesman Fernando Burgos said in an email to the Star. The Embassy of Equatorial Guinea in the U.S. did not respond to the Star's questions about Soliman's claims. Equatorial Guinea's agreement with the U.S. State Department — which neither ICE nor the State Department would share with the Star — gave the African nation $7.5 million in exchange for accepting U.S. deportees.