On Thursday, the first group of 12 people deported from the United States touched down on Ugandan soil, marking the first known arrivals after the two nations finalized a bilateral deportation transfer deal, the Uganda Law Society confirmed this week.
The group arrived via a chartered private flight, and the Ugandan legal advocacy organization harshly condemned the process that delivered the deportees, calling the transfer an “undignified, harrowing and dehumanizing” act that effectively amounted to dumping unwanted people in the East African nation. It has launched a legal push to block further transfers, labeling the arrangement an “international illegality” and arguing the deportees have been left vulnerable to unaccountable private actors on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean with no oversight or protection.
This first transfer of deportees is part of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, a policy designed to cut flows of undocumented migration into the U.S. while removing people who have already entered the country illegally, particularly those with criminal convictions. The policy targets people who cannot be readily deported directly to their home countries by resettling them in agreed third-party nations.
U.S. federal agencies including the State Department and Department of Homeland Security have defended third-country deportation deals as a necessary mechanism to speed up the removal of undocumented people from U.S. territory. But the policy has faced sustained legal challenges in both U.S. courts and courts in the nations that receive deportees, and has sparked widespread global criticism over humanitarian risks.
The core of the controversy stems from the fact that many deportees transferred under these deals have no cultural, social or family ties to the third-party countries where they are sent, leaving them stateless and isolated. The high-stakes debate gained national attention in the U.S. earlier this year when federal officials briefly considered moving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant at the center of a heated national migration dispute, to Uganda under the agreement, before reversing the plan.
To date, the U.S. has signed similar third-country deportation arrangements with at least seven different African nations, spanning from West Africa’s Ghana to the southern African kingdom of Eswatini. Publicly released State Department details show the U.S. agreed to provide Eswatini with $5.1 million in exchange for accepting up to 160 deportees. As of this reporting, there is no public information confirming whether Uganda received similar financial compensation for agreeing to take deportees.
Details around the 12 new arrivals remain scarce: officials have not released information about their identities, citizenship or countries of origin. Okello Oryem, Uganda’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, told reporters he was traveling at the time of the arrival and had not been briefed on the landing. A spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, also declined to answer questions about the deportees’ current welfare or status.
This development contradicts earlier statements from Oryem, who told the Associated Press last month that Uganda was preparing to receive multiple planeloads of deportees from the U.S. He framed the bilateral deal at the time as an act aligned with pan-African solidarity and humanitarian principle, designed to repatriate African people who were living without documentation in the U.S. Ugandan officials have also previously stated the agreement only covers non-criminal deportees of African origin, but that detail has not been confirmed for the 12 people who arrived this week.