Four journalists, including three working for the Associated Press, were detained in Cameroon on Tuesday while reporting from a facility where migrants deported by the Trump administration are held, according to two lawyers advocating for the deportees and one of the detained journalists.
Awah Joseph Fru, a lawyer representing deported migrants, was detained alongside the journalists.
About 15 migrants who are not from Cameroon have been sent to the country by the United States since January, according to Alma David, one of the attorneys advocating for the deportees. The deportations to Cameroon come amid broader efforts by the Trump administration to pressure foreign nations into signing onto secretive third-country deportation agreements, which allow the federal government to remove migrants from the U.S. and send them to places other than their country of origin.
Fru and freelance journalist Randy Joe Sa’ah said that they and the three AP journalists were detained for about five hours before they were all released Tuesday evening, and that the journalists’ devices — including laptops, phones and cameras — were confiscated by law enforcement. Fru said he saw that one of the journalists displayed bruises upon their release.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Fru said the detentions are government “intimidation.”
Fru, who said he is now representing the journalists as well, said he isn’t aware of any current charges against them or him. “As a lawyer, I had a right to be there with these clients and talking to them,” he said. “If that’s what you’re going to be charging me with, issue me a charging document and let me know.”
He said he was detained with the journalists after some of them took photos of the facility.
During his interrogation, said Sa’ah, who was not on assignment for a particular publication, he was asked about what outlets he worked for and what he had photographed. He did not have a camera, he said, but authorities confiscated his laptop and phone. He was not physically harmed, he said.
The White House and the State Department declined to comment on whether the U.S. has a third-country deportation agreement with Cameroon and whether it planned to raise the arrests or free-speech issues with the Cameroonian government.
Felix Mbayu, a top official with Cameroon’s Ministry of External Relations, referred questions about the arrests to the U.S. government. Cameroon’s Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
David, who works for Novo Legal Group, said many of the deportees in Cameroon had been granted withholding of removal by an immigration judge, which barred them from being deported to their home countries. As part of its effort to curtail asylum rights in the U.S., the Trump administration has increasingly sought to send migrants who have been granted withholding of removal to third countries that are willing to take them.
The deportees are citizens of Angola, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Morocco, Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, Ethiopia, Kenya and Sierra Leone, David said.
The journalists who had been detained spoke to some of the deportees and took photographs of the facility before they were approached by plainclothes police officers while leaving the facility, according to Fru and Sa’ah.
The three Associated Press journalists were freelancers working on assignment for the global news service. A spokeswoman for the AP, Nicole Meir, wrote in an email that one of the journalists was slapped but “did not sustain serious injury.” The others, she said, were not physically harmed.
The New York Times first reported the detentions Wednesday evening.
The incident underscores poor protections for press freedom in Cameroon, said Angela Quintal, the Africa regional director at the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists. “What happened to them is not surprising,” Quintal said in an interview. “It’s just part of a pattern where journalists are unable to do their work here.”
Although Cameroon has a lively media landscape, press freedom groups including the CPJ and Reporters Without Borders consider it to be one of the most dangerous countries for journalists in Africa. “The general context for the media in Cameroon is a context of fear,” said Sadibou Marong, head of Reporters Without Borders’s West Africa bureau. “They are working in very difficult conditions.”
Separate from this week’s incident, four journalists are imprisoned in the country because of their work, according to the CPJ. Physical attacks, arbitrary detention and surveillance are common. In 2023, radio journalist Martinez Zogo was abducted and later found dead
In October, Reporters Without Borders wrote that President Paul Biya’s four-decade reign has been “dark for the press” and called the country “one of the most dangerous in Africa for the profession,” echoing findings by other groups.
Scott Griffen, executive director of the International Press Institute, said in an emailed statement, “Detaining journalists reporting on matters of the public interest is a direct and flagrant attempt by authorities to subvert the Cameroonian public’s right to know what their government is doing both on the world stage and at home.”
Quintal said she’s especially worried that authorities confiscated the journalists’ devices, a move that raises concerns about their ability to protect vulnerable sources and the risk of the devices being compromised with spyware.
Fru said he is trying to pressure authorities to return the journalists’ devices. “This is their working gear, for God’s sake,” he said.
Sa’ah, a 55-year-old who has freelanced for outlets including the BBC and Reuters, estimates that he has been arrested seven times over the course of his career, which he said is an indication of the broader challenges facing Cameroonian reporters.
But compared with previous arrests, “this was a very soft one,” he said. “I’m going to continue doing my job.”
Rael Ombuor and Adam Taylor contributed to this report.
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