« Welcome to Liberia. You’re in Africa. » Paola Ferreira Dos Santos, a 21-year-old Brazilian, says that sentence, heard as she stepped off the plane, was how she learned where she had been sent. She is one of the migrants the United States deported to Monrovia on August 20, none of whom has any connection to this West African country. At least twenty people arrived at Roberts International Airport, according to the Liberian authorities. The American network CBS, which met several of them, counted fifteen on a single flight.
The deportees come from Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Venezuela, and also from Cameroon and Eritrea. « I had never heard of Liberia, » admits Arin Garcia Yepes, a Colombian. Elvis Rodriguez Venturas, a Honduran, worked in construction in Texas, where his four children still live, two of them US citizens. He says he feels « far away, on the other side of the world. »
Most of them had won protection in US immigration courts barring their return to their home countries, where they risk persecution. That protection did not give them permanent status in the United States. The Trump administration is using that gap: since it cannot send them home, it sends them somewhere else.
Liberia has agreed to take up to 1,200 people under the deal, and neither its timetable nor what Liberia gets in return has been made public. Justice Minister Natu Oswald Tweh said that deportees who wish to stay can apply for asylum and that the others are free to leave. In practice, they are housed in a hotel on the coast, where the International Organization for Migration provides for their basic needs. In theory they can leave the country, but they are afraid to go home.
The case has just taken a new legal turn in Washington. On September 29, the US Supreme Court allowed the administration to keep deporting people to third countries for now, after an appeals court had halted the practice. The justices have yet to rule on the underlying question: whether migrants must have a meaningful chance to object before being sent to a country where they have no ties. Until then, flights can resume, including to Monrovia. According to figures cited in court, about 25,000 people have already been deported this way to more than two dozen countries, Mexico first among them. Around ten African states have signed similar agreements.
Lawyers and advocacy groups say these deals bypass the protections normally owed to asylum seekers. In Liberia, the issue touches on the country’s history. The territory was founded in the nineteenth century by the American Colonization Society, which promoted sending free Black Americans, seen as unwanted in the United States, to Africa. Historians see a parallel between those departures and today’s flights.