One Saturday morning in early September, I got a WhatsApp video call from eleven strangers locked inside a secretive detention camp in a forest in Ghana. Their faces looked glazed with sweat and stricken with fear. In the background, I could hear birdsong and the drone of insects. An armed guard watched over the group as they huddled around a shared cellphone.

“There are big snakes here, and scorpions!” a male voice with an American accent called out.

“My stomach is really hurting, and we have to beg for food,” another man said.

A third added, “We fear we’ll be tortured and killed.”

One of the men, a car salesman and a real-estate agent from Miami, whom I’ll call Jim, gave me a tour of the scene: an open-air military complex known as Bundase Training Camp, some forty miles from Accra.

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