Liberia announced in a statement on Tuesday, August 18, that it would welcome up to 1,200 people of foreign nationality deported from the United States within a year, as part of President Donald Trump’s unprecedented program of expulsion of illegal foreign nationals to third countries.
The first twenty deportees are due to arrive in Liberia on Thursday, the text adds. They will be “free to leave the country whenever they wish” or request asylum. Washington did not immediately react.
According to The New York Timesthe Trump government wants to send to the country Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who became a symbol of American expulsion policy, deported by mistake to El Salvador and then brought back to the United States. On the African continent, Ghana and even Equatorial Guinea have become transit points for people expelled by the American authorities.
Neither “compensation” nor “promise of reward”
Since his return to the White House in 2025, Donald Trump has expanded the number of people subject to deportation, targeting in particular those who benefited from legal protections allowing them, under previous administrations, to live and work in the United States due to the risk of persecution in their countries of origin. The US government maintains that, although it cannot return these people to their countries of origin, nothing prohibits it from sending them to third countries.
According to an investigation by Agence France-Presse, the United States has proposed agreements worth millions of dollars and brandished the threat of visa restrictions to encourage third countries, particularly in Africa, to accept expelled people, Africans or from other continents.
The Liberian government clarified in its statement that it had neither requested nor received “compensation or promise of reward” in exchange. “Liberia will benefit from support to help manage this program and strengthen its migration system more generally”under this partnership of “entirely humanitarian” according to him.
