Rwanda has agreed to accept 250 deportees from the United States, a Rwandan government spokeswoman said on Tuesday, making the African nation the latest country to work with the Trump administration as it seeks to expel tens of thousands of migrants in American custody.
“Rwanda has agreed with the United States to accept up to 250 migrants, in part because nearly every Rwandan family has experienced the hardships of displacement,” said the government spokesman, Yolande Makolo.
Rwanda isn’t the only African nation to strike a deal with the United States to accept deportees. In July, the U.S. Supreme Court approved the deportation of eight men to South Sudan. The kingdom of Eswatini also accepted five deportees from the United States that same month, though it soon announced plans to repatriate them to their home countries.
Unlike Eswatini, Rwanda said it planned to integrate the deportees. They will be resettled and provided with job training, health care and places to stay in order to “jump start their lives in Rwanda,” Ms. Makolo said.
She said Rwanda had approval power over which U.S. deportees to accept.
In April, the Trump administration paid Rwanda $100,000 to take an Iraqi man, according to a U.S. cable. Talks about Rwanda’s accepting more migrants began as early as May, according to one Rwandan official.
The plan, reported earlier on Tuesday by Reuters, is reminiscent of a failed migrant deal struck between Britain and Rwanda.
In 2022, Britain signed an agreement to resettle asylum seekers in Rwanda, and then spent years and hundreds of millions of pounds in futile attempts to make it happen. The British government said it would look into recovering the money, but Rwandan officials said they were not required to pay it back.
Rwanda once also accepted deportees from Israel for years under a secretive 2013 deal. A British court found that Rwanda had quietly moved those asylum seekers out of the country.
The small, landlocked country earned a reputation as an example of recovery and resilience after a 1994 genocide that left about 800,000 people dead. But more recently, critics have called its human rights record into question.
Eve Sampson is a reporter covering international news and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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