A senior State Department official who helped negotiate the Trump administration’s controversial “third country” deportation deals with African nations has been nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Cameroon.
Christian Ehrhardt, 41, has served since last year as deputy assistant secretary at the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugee, and Migration. He oversees the Office of Remigration, created by the administration to facilitate the removal of migrants to countries where they are not citizens. The White House announced Ehrhardt’s nomination Monday.
Ehrhardt’s nomination must be approved by the U.S. Senate. Senate Democrats have sharply criticized the third-country deportation program.
The Trump administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to secure agreements with 35 countries, according to a Washington Post examination, and more than 25,000 people have been deported under the deals. Human rights advocates and lawyers for the migrants have alleged that they have faced inhumane conditions, threats and physical abuse while in third-country custody.
Current and former U.S. officials said Ehrhardt had the backing of the White House, where Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller was a key supporter of the third-county deportation policy. These people, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Ehrhardt spent almost two decades as a career official working in diplomatic security, providing security to embassies, including in several African countries and was viewed by some State Department officials as an unusual choice when the Trump administration tapped him last year to lead the immigration-related policy job because he had not previously focused on migration issues or held more senior diplomatic roles.
“Christian Ehrhardt has helped turn a bureau created to protect refugees into an operation that shops human beings around the world to governments willing to take them,” Shawn VanDiver, president of #AfghanEvac, which supports refugees from Afghanistan, said Tuesday.
Neither the White House nor the State Department immediately responded to requests for comment.
An agency spokesperson previously described Ehrhardt as a dedicated public servant who had “worked tirelessly to promote prosperity and security for the American people.”
The State Department has a deal with Cameroon to accept up to 1,000 third-country nationals in exchange for a $30 million grant to the International Organization for Migration to help support the refugees in that country. Through June, the United States deported 36 migrants to Cameroon under the agreement, according to internal State Department records reviewed by The Post.
This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit ruled that the Trump administration’s third-country deportation policy is unlawful. The three-judge panel upheld a decision from a lower court judge who said the government violated legal due process by failing to allow migrants a chance to make fear-based claims challenging their removals.
The appeals court ordered the administration to immediately stop third country deportations. The Justice Department has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ehrhardt previously served in Cameroon as a regional security officer and was close with the country’s security establishment, according to two officials who worked with him. In 2018, the Cameroonian government awarded him the rank of knight in the Cameroonian Order of Valor.
Several officials who worked with Ehrhardt during this period remember him as competent and charismatic, albeit someone whose ambitions at times brought him into conflict with his superiors at the State Department.
Ehrhardt told one former colleague that he was leaving his most recent posting in Algeria early because “he had this opportunity to, as he put it, become a political appointee,” this person recalled. This person said that Ehrhardt hoped to become an ambassador.
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