By Alphonso Toweh
MONROVIA, Aug 20 (Reuters) – People deported by the U.S. to Liberia will mostly hail from Latin American countries including Cuba and Venezuela, Liberia’s information minister told Reuters, as authorities received the first deportation flight on Thursday.
The West African nation announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to accept up to 1,200 third-country deportees from the U.S. in the next 12 months, the latest of several deals the Trump administration has implemented on the continent to accelerate removals.
A government statement on Tuesday said the deportees would come from “African and Western Hemisphere countries”, without specifying, while the State Department did not provide details on nationalities.
Liberia’s information minister, Jerolinmek Piah, told Reuters that “most of the people are from Latin American countries. Some from Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia and others.”
He said the International Organization for Migration and the U.N. refugee agency would help provide services for them, as has been the case elsewhere in Africa.
FIRST FLIGHT ARRIVED ON THURSDAY
Though details of the Trump administration’s third-country deportation arrangements are not often publicised, Liberia’s agreement to accept up to 1,200 deportees makes it one of the largest on the African continent, where the U.S. has also reached deals with Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Ghana and Sierra Leone.
Third-country deportees have in most cases obtained legal protection against repatriation after U.S. immigration judges ruled they risked torture or other abuses in their home countries.
Washington has defended the third-country deals as lawful, although rights groups and advocates have said many of the deportees were ultimately repatriated.
Liberia said on Tuesday that the deportees would be received “as guests” who could leave when they wanted and who could apply for asylum in Liberia.
Liberia said the first flight, which arrived on Thursday, would transport 20 deportees. It has not provided information on their nationalities.
The plane arrived in Monrovia at 12:45 local time (1245 GMT) after taking off from Louisiana and stopping in Dakar, Senegal, according to two Liberian security sources and the ICE Flight Monitor managed by Human Rights First.
U.S. AWARDS $5 MILLION FOR ‘MIGRATION MANAGEMENT’
In its statement on Tuesday, Liberia described the deportation deal as consistent with its history as a refuge for freed slaves from the U.S. and as a country with “a long history of accepting people seeking refuge from political and other crises”.
Liberia said on Tuesday that it was not demanding compensation for taking in deportees but that the government would receive “support to help manage the programme and strengthen its migration system more broadly.”
The U.S. this year awarded $5 million to Liberia for “migration management activities”.
In October last year, Liberia said it was willing to accept Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the migrant whose wrongful deportation to El Salvador became a flashpoint in Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Abrego Garcia has obtained an injunction preventing his removal to Liberia from the federal district court in Maryland, his lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said on Thursday.
“The government has appealed that order, but the order remains in place while the appeal is pending, and we are confident that we will prevail on the appeal,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
(Reporting by Alphonso Toweh; Additional reporting and writing by Robbie Corey-Boulet; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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