Uganda receives first U.S. deportation flight under third-country agreement

Rachel Savage and agenciesFriday April 3, 2026

A deportation flight from the United States has touched down in Uganda, underscoring Donald Trump’s drive to send migrants to countries where they have no roots, no family and, in many cases, no clear future.

The people removed from the US will remain in the east African country as “a transition phase for potential onward transmission to other countries”, an unnamed senior Ugandan government official told Reuters.

The Uganda Law Society, which has denounced the arrivals, said 12 people were aboard the aircraft, the first under an agreement Uganda signed with the US in August. No further information, including the deportees’ nationalities, has been made public.

The US has already sent dozens of people to third countries. Other African nations that have taken in, or agreed to take in, deportees include Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda and South Sudan. Those removed have come from as far afield as Cuba, Jamaica, Yemen, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.

The Uganda Law Society said it would launch legal challenges to the deportations in Ugandan and regional courts. It condemned what it described as “an undignified, harrowing and dehumanising process that has reduced [the deported people] to little more than chattel, for the benefit of private interests on both sides of the Atlantic”.

Yasmeen Hibrawi, a public affairs counsellor at the US embassy in Kampala, said all deportations “are in full cooperation with the government of Uganda”.

Hibrawi added: “We do not, however, discuss the details of our private diplomatic communications and for privacy reasons, we cannot discuss the particulars to their cases.”

In August, Uganda said it had struck a deal with the US to receive people from third countries who might not be eligible for asylum in the US but were “reluctant” to return to their home nations.

The government said it would not accept people with criminal records or unaccompanied minors, and did not say whether Washington would pay for the arrangement. Uganda already hosts nearly 2 million refugees and asylum seekers, most of them from elsewhere in east Africa, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan.

According to the Associated Press, deportation orders to Uganda have been issued to hundreds of asylum seekers. Before the flight arrived, Oryem Okello, Uganda’s minister of state for foreign affairs, said no asylum seekers had yet been sent from the US.

He said Washington may be “doing a cost analysis” and trying to avoid sending aircraft with only a handful of people on board. “You can’t be doing one, two people at a time. Planeloads – that is the most effective way,” Okello said.

Reuters reported that the US agreed to pay Eswatini $5.1m (£3.8m) to accept up to 160 third-country nationals. Five men were deported there in July, followed by another 10 in October. Two have since been returned to Jamaica and Cambodia, while the remainder are being held in a maximum security prison.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was detaining more than 63,000 people in the US as of 12 March, according to government data. Toddlers and newborn babies were among the 5,600 people held at an ICE detention centre in Dilley, Texas, between April 2025 and February 2026, according to a report by the non-profit organisations Human Rights First and Raices.