Uganda receives first US deportation flight under third-country agreement

A flight carrying people being deported from the US has landed in Uganda, as Donald Trump’s administration pushes on with its strategy of expelling migrants to countries they have no ties to.The deported people would stay in the east African country as “a transition phase for potential onward transmission to other countries”, an unnamed senior Ugandan government official told Reuters.The Uganda-law-society" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="90986" data-entity-type="organization">Uganda Law Society, which condemned the arrivals, said 12 people were on the flight, the first under an agreement Uganda signed with the US in August. No other details of the deportees, including their nationalities, have been made public.The US has already deported dozens of people to third countries. Other African countries that have accepted or agreed to accept deportees include Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda and South Sudan which have received people from as far afield as Cuba, Jamaica, Yemen, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.The Uganda-law-society" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="90986" data-entity-type="organization">Uganda Law Society said it would be filing legal challenges to the deportations in Ugandan and regional courts. It criticised “an undignified, harrowing and dehumanising process that has reduced [the deported people] to little more than chattel, for the benefit of private interests on both sides of the Atlantic”.All deportations “are in full cooperation with the government of Uganda”, said Yasmeen Hibrawi, a public affairs counsellor at the US embassy in Kampala.Hibrawi said: “We do not, however, discuss the details of our private diplomatic communications and for privacy reasons, we cannot discuss the particulars to their cases.”In August, Uganda said it had reached a deal with the US to take in people from third countries who might not get asylum in the US but were “reluctant” to be sent back to their home countries.It said it would not accept people with criminal records or unaccompanied minors and did not specify if the US was paying. Uganda already hosts nearly 2 million refugees and asylum seekers, most from other east African countries including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan.Uganda’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Oryem Okello, says the US may be trying to avoid dispatching flights with only a few people onboard. Photograph: Divyakant Solanki/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockOrders for deportation to Uganda have been issued to hundreds of asylum seekers, according to the Associated Press. Oryem Okello, the Ugandan minister of state for foreign affairs, said before the deportation flight arrived that no asylum seekers had been sent by the US yet.The US may be “doing a cost analysis” and trying to avoid dispatching flights with only a few people onboard, he said. Okello added: “You can’t be doing one, two people at a time. Planeloads – that is the most effective way.”The US agreed to pay Eswatini $5.1m (£3.8m) to take up to 160 third-country nationals, according to Reuters. Five men were deported by the US to the southern African nation in July, with another 10 sent in October. Two have since been repatriated to Jamaica and Cambodia respectively, while the rest remain in a maximum security prison.US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had detained more than 63,000 people in the US, as of 12 March, according to government data. Toddlers and newborn babies were among the 5,600 people imprisoned at an ICE detention centre in Dilley, Texas, between April 2025 and February 2026, according to a report by the non-profit organisations Human Rights First and Raices.