Uganda receives first US deportation flight under third country agreement | American immigration

A flight of people being deported from the US has landed Ugandawhile Donald Trump’s administration continues its strategy of deporting migrants to countries with which they have no ties.

The deported people will remain in the East African country as “a transitional phase for potential onward transfer to other countries,” an unnamed senior Ugandan government official told Reuters.

The Uganda Law Society, which condemned the arrivals, said 12 people were on the run, the first under an agreement Uganda signed with the US in August. No other details of the sports, including their nationalities, have been released.

The US has already deported dozens of people to third countries. Other African countries that have accepted or agreed to accept sports include EswatiniGhana, Rwanda and South Sudan which received people from as far away as Cuba, Jamaica, Yemen, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.

The Uganda Law Society said it would file legal challenges to the deportations in Ugandan and regional courts. It criticized “an undignified, disturbing and dehumanizing process that has reduced (the deported people) to little more than chattels, 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 counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kampala.

Hibrawi said: “However, we do not discuss the details of our private diplomatic communications and for privacy reasons we cannot discuss the details of their cases.”

In August, Uganda said it had reached an agreement with the US taking in people from third countries who might not be granted asylum in the US but were “reluctant” to be sent back to their home countries.

Item said it will not accept people with criminal records or unaccompanied minors and did not specify whether the U.S. will pay. 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.

Orders for deportation to Uganda have been issued to hundreds of asylum seekers, according to the Associated Press. Oryem Okello, the Ugandan foreign minister, said before the deportation flight that no asylum seekers had yet been sent by the US.

The U.S. may be doing a cost analysis and trying to avoid sending flights with only a few people on board, he said. Okello added: “You can’t do one, two people at a time. Plane loads – that’s the most efficient way.”

The US has 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 10 more on the way sent in October. Two have since been repatriated to Jamaica and Cambodia respectively, while the rest remain in a maximum security prison.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained more than 63,000 people in the U.S. as of March 12, according to government data. Toddlers and newborn babies were among the 5,600 people held in an ICE detention center in Dilley, Texas, between April 2025 and February 2026, according to a report by the non-profit organizations Human Rights First and Raices.