Liberia has agreed to accept up to 1,200 third-country deportees from the United States, authorities in the West African nation said Tuesday, in one of the largest such arrangements struck under the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown — with the first group of 20 arrivals expected on Thursday.
Liberia’s Information Minister Jerolinmek Piah told reporters the deportees will be received over the course of a year, and will include Africans as well as nationals from North America, South America and the Caribbean.
Justice Minister Natu Oswald Tweh said the government has already screened the list of migrants ahead of their arrival, noting that “most of them are people who had immigration violations and offenses.”
Piah added that those arriving “may wish to seek asylum” in Liberia or “can leave the country whenever they desire,” and said Washington will provide support to help Liberia manage the programme and strengthen its migration system.
Piah cast the arrangement in humanitarian terms, saying “Liberia’s gesture is entirely humanitarian and in keeping with the country’s longstanding traditions,” and stating that the government intends to provide the transferred people with the necessary support to seek protection and remain safe during their stay.
Neither minister said whether the incoming deportees carry protection orders issued by U.S. immigration judges barring their return to their home countries over safety concerns — a detail immigration lawyers say is central to why such agreements are controversial: under the Trump administration, thousands of people have been deported to nearly two dozen countries that are not their own, with roughly ten of those countries in Africa, and advocates argue the practice functions as a legal loophole to indirectly force asylum seekers back toward danger even when a U.S. court has ruled they cannot be safely returned home.
Liberia’s decision follows months of public uncertainty over whether such a deal was even on the table.
In July, the Liberian government explicitly denied that any formal U.S. request had been made, with presidential press secretary Kula Fofana stating flatly that “the White House has made no such request.”
President Joseph Boakai later struck a softer tone in a Washington interview, saying he didn’t get the impression the Americans were forcing anyone to sign anything, but that the U.S. had asylum seekers it wanted moved elsewhere and was asking how Liberia could help.
That ambiguity culminated in a White House summit where Trump hosted the leaders of Liberia, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Gabon and Senegal, telling them, “I hope we can bring down the high rates of people overstaying visas and also make progress on the safe third-country agreements.”
Liberia is not the only African nation the administration has leaned on for individual, high-profile removals. U.S. officials have separately pushed to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador earlier this year in violation of a court settlement — to Liberia, after earlier attempts to send him to Uganda, Eswatini and Ghana all failed.
Justice Department filings describe Liberia as “a thriving democracy and one of the United States’s closest partners on the African continent,” while Abrego Garcia’s attorney has called the effort “punitive, cruel and unconstitutional.”
Liberia joins a small but growing list of African countries that have accepted deportees under similar arrangements, including Rwanda, Eswatini, Ghana and Uganda. It also comes even as roughly 4,000 Liberians in the U.S. continue to benefit from Deferred Enforced Departure, a separate protected-status programme shielding them from removal — an arrangement Trump has previously extended, underscoring the two-track nature of U.S.-Liberia migration policy.
