At first glance, the hotel looks like any other on this tropical island off the central African coast, with its palm tree-lined driveway, marble-floored foyer and portrait of the oil-rich country’s president hanging behind a mahogany reception desk.

Yet the eerily empty Bamy hotel is not a refuge for adventure-seeking tourists or international business travelers these days. Since late last year, only a small number of people have been staying there, and they aren’t on vacation. They are being held against their will.

Under an opaque $7.5m deal with the Trump administration, Equatorial Guinea’s all-powerful president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has turned this hotel owned by his family into a prison for asylum seekers deported from the United States.

The hotel is just a way station, though. Of the at least 32 people imprisoned there since November – all of whom had previously been granted protection by US judges, their lawyers said – 25 have been forced to go back to home countries across Africa where their lives might be in danger. The rest face pressure from authorities to leave.

“Government people would come all the time and say, ‘Where is your passport? You need to go back to your own country,’” said a 26-year-old man from an east African country imprisoned at the hotel. Out of fear of retaliation, he spoke on condition of anonymity, as did two other deportees interviewed by the Associated Press.

The Trump administration uses deportations to third countries as a legal loophole, immigration lawyers say, to indirectly force asylum seekers back to their home countries.

Because Equatorial Guinea is run by an authoritarian government, as are some other countries that have signed similar deals, it is difficult for foreign journalists to visit and report directly on conditions there. The AP traveled to the island of Bioko as part of a recent visit by the first American pope, and is the only international news organization to visit the hotel detaining migrants.

Earlier this month, human rights experts at the United Nations issued a rare public appeal to the country, urging it to halt its plans to return US deportees to their home countries, where they face political violence, torture and death.

The statement, co-signed by a representative of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, adds diplomatic pressure on Equatorial Guinea, one of the world’s most repressive regimes, to comply with international human rights standards and avoid refoulement, or the expulsion of people to countries where they face persecution.

Trapped for now in a country many had never heard of before arriving, men and women from Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Mauritania wander the hotel’s long corridors and gaze out the windows at the shimmering pool they are not allowed to use.

They haven’t faced any physical abuse, but they feel intense psychological pressure knowing they are likely headed back to home countries they fear.

“I am scared and depressed,” said the east African man.

Because of his ethnicity and the fact he fled his home country, he said he would be imprisoned or killed if forced to return there. All of the asylum seekers at the hotel face a high risk of persecution back home, human rights experts say.

Under a series of murky and often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to nearly two dozen countries that are not their own, advocates say, all part of the broad US crackdown on immigration. The countries with agreements are mostly in the developing world, according to the group Third Country Deportation Watch, including roughly a dozen in Africa. Experts say countries accepting the deportees may be doing so to earn goodwill in negotiations with the US over trade, migration or aid.

The Trump administration declined to comment on the details of its deal with Equatorial Guinea. A state department spokesperson said: “We remain unwavering in our commitment to end illegal and mass immigration.”

The Obiang administration did not respond to a request seeking comment.

Representatives of the UN’s International Organization for Migration, and its refugee agency, visited the hotel in November, and promised the deportees they would come back, but they did not.