A significant event in the realm of international migration and deportation policies marked its debut as a flight carrying deportees from the United States landed in Uganda. This development comes amidst the Donald Trump administration’s strategy to expel migrants to countries with which they have no known ties. An unnamed senior Ugandan government official described the situation to Reuters, explaining that the deportees would serve as a “transition phase for potential onward transmission to other countries.”.
The Uganda Law Society has expressed strong disapproval of the deportations, noting that 12 individuals were aboard the flight, marking the first under an agreement that Uganda signed with the US in August. Details about the nationalities of the deportees have not been disclosed to the public. The US has previously deported numerous individuals to third countries, with destinations including Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda, and South Sudan, which have received deportees from various countries such as Cuba, Jamaica, Yemen, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar.
The Uganda Law Society plans to file legal challenges against the deportations in both Ugandan and regional courts. The organization has criticized the process as “undignified, harrowing, and dehumanizing, “describing it as a reduction of individuals to mere “chattel “for the benefit of private interests on both sides of the Atlantic. Yasmeen Hibrawi, the public affairs counsellor at the US embassy in Kampala, confirmed that all deportations are conducted “in full cooperation with the government of Uganda.”However, she refrained from discussing the specifics of the cases due to privacy concerns.
Under the agreement, Uganda had indicated that it would not accept individuals with criminal records or unaccompanied minors, and it did not specify whether the US was providing financial compensation. Uganda already accommodates nearly 2 million refugees and asylum seekers, predominantly from neighboring east African countries. Orders for deportation to Uganda have been issued to hundreds of asylum seekers, although none have arrived yet, according to Oryem Okello, the Ugandan minister for foreign affairs. Okello suggested that the US might be conducting a cost analysis to avoid sending flights with only a few deportees on board, advocating for “planeloads “as the most effective approach.
In a related case, the US agreed to pay Eswatini $5. 1m to accept up to 160 third-country nationals. Five men were deported to the southern African nation in July, with another 10 sent in October.
Two of the deportees have since been repatriated to Jamaica and Cambodia, while the rest remain in a maximum security prison. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had detained over 63,000 people in the US as of 12 March, according to government data. A report by non-profit organizations Human Rights First and Raices revealed that toddlers and newborn babies were among the 5,600 people imprisoned at an ICE detention center in Dilley, Texas, between April 2025 and February 2026.
