Why the US Is Sending Deportees to Liberia — and What Could Go Wrong
On August 20, 2026, twenty people were deported from the United States and arrived at an airport outside Monrovia, Liberia. They are the first group in a deal where Liberia has agreed to take in up to 1,200 people over the next year. The Liberian government announced it had accepted the deal on August 18. The BBC and the New York Times called it one of the biggest deportation agreements the Trump administration has reached so far. The people being sent are not only from Africa. Liberia's information minister, Jerolinnek M. Piah, said the full group of 1,200 will include people from Africa, North America, South America, and the Caribbean.
Liberia's justice minister, Natu Oswald Tweh, said most of the deportees had broken immigration-related laws and that they could apply for asylum — protection granted to people who cannot safely return to their home country — if they wanted to. The deal is part of a broader set of agreements, many of them secret, through which the Trump administration has sent thousands of people to nearly two dozen countries that are not their own, about 10 of them in Africa. The Guardian
There is also a separate program, announced in May 2025, that offers travel help and money to people who agree to leave the US on their own through a phone app called CBP Home. The government says this could cut deportation costs by about 70 percent. That program runs alongside the third-country deals rather than replacing them.
The broader context here is that the US has been steadily expanding a system of sending people to countries they are not from, as a way to enforce immigration law. This approach helps the government avoid some of the difficulties that come up when trying to send someone directly back to their home country — for example, when that country refuses to take them back or when the person has an asylum claim still being reviewed. By sending people through countries willing to accept them under these agreements, the US shifts both the legal responsibility and the human cost of deportation to another country.
Immigration lawyers argue that this system can work as a roundabout way of sending people back to the countries they were trying to escape. In many cases, people are sent to countries they have never been to or where they face known dangers, leaving them with few choices beyond going home. This concern is called chain refoulement — when someone removed to Country B ends up back in Country A, the country they fled. It is the central worry behind the legal criticism.
What makes the Liberia deal stand out is its size and the fact that the people being sent come from all over the world. Earlier agreements like this usually involved smaller numbers or people with some connection to the country receiving them. Liberia taking 1,200 people from across the Americas and Africa, with no prior tie to Liberia required, shows that Monrovia is willing to act as a broad destination for deportees. The economic and diplomatic reasons behind that willingness have not been made public.
Several things will determine whether the deal holds up or faces legal and political pushback. Liberia's offer of asylum is important: if many deportees apply for and receive asylum in Liberia, it could undermine the US goal of reducing the number of people with active asylum claims. On the other hand, if those asylum applications are denied or delayed, the deportees are left with few options — staying in Liberia under difficult conditions or going back to the countries they came from, which is exactly the outcome advocates call indirect refoulement.
Legal challenges in US federal courts are likely. Third-country deportations have already faced lawsuits over whether people were given a fair chance to contest being sent to a country where they have no connections. The secrecy around the terms of these agreements, not just with Liberia but across the board, makes it harder for advocates to challenge deportations before they happen.
For now, the first 20 arrivals show that the deal is operational. Whether Liberia can absorb 1,200 people over the next year, and how the public in a country of about five million people with its own economic struggles will react, will be watched closely by the US administration expanding this system and the legal community trying to limit it.
