Ghanaian mother and child detained at airport for days after arriving on valid visas, lawyers say

A pregnant woman from Ghana who entered the U.S. on a valid visa with her four-year-old son so he could receive medical care has been held for more than a week in a windowless detention room at a Washington airport, her lawyers said in court documents.

Annabella Gyasi arrived last Tuesday at Washington Dulles International Airport ahead of an appointment she had arranged for her son, who was born with malformed hands, at Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio, according to an emergency petition filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia.

The pair had come to the U.S. in 2024 for medical care, her lawyers say, but had returned to Ghana after being told the boy was still too young for surgery.

This time, they had booked a connecting flight for a May 30 appointment in Akron to see if he was old enough for surgery.

Instead, both were detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection after Gyasi, 38 and a little more than four months pregnant, said she feared returning to Ghana because of persecution they had both faced, her lawyers say.

“Ms. Gyasi legally traveled to the U.S. to get necessary medical care for her son, but the illegal detention and inhumane treatment that she’s experiencing at Dulles is endangering her son’s health as well as her own,” Sophia Gregg, senior immigrants’ rights attorney at the ACLU of Virginia, said in a statement.

Immigration officials insisted she had not been mistreated.

“These allegations are false,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “Everyone in CBP custody, including this individual, has access to appropriate care, including medical evaluation by a doctor, medication, and food.”

Since arriving in the U.S., Gyasi has been hospitalized twice for pregnancy complications, including vaginal bleeding and lightheadedness, but was returned both times to the detention room at Dulles, the lawyers say. In one visit, doctors “expressed concern that she was not eating enough in detention and was over-stressed,” the legal group said in a statement.

Gyasi repeatedly told guards she and her son were hungry, but they were denied additional food, the lawyers say.

Fearing for the unborn baby, Gyasi said she would rather be deported than not have enough food. She was provided food once she signed a deportation order, the lawyers say.

The lawyers later told Customs and Border Protection officers that she had only agreed to be deported out of desperation.

An order from U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema quoted immigration officials as saying Gyasi could not use the tourist visas to enter the U.S. and was being processed for expedited removal because she had “admitted under oath that she came to the United States in order to seek asylum and her intent was not to leave the United States to return to Ghana.”

Brinkema ordered a Friday hearing for oral arguments.