Uganda said it has not reached any agreement with the US to take in undocumented immigrants, contradicting reports that the east African country had struck a deal with the Trump administration to do so.
Henry Oryem Okello, Uganda’s state minister for foreign affairs, told Reuters the country does not have the capability to take in immigrants. It comes as the US has deported migrants convicted of crimes in the US to non-native countries including South Sudan and Eswatini.
“To the best of my knowledge we have not reached such an agreement. We do not have the facilities and infrastructure to accommodate such illegal immigrants in Uganda. So, we cannot take in such illegal immigrants,” Oryem said.
On Tuesday, CBS News, citing internal government documents, reported that the White House had reached deportation deals with Honduras and Uganda. CBS News wrote that Uganda had “agreed to accept deportees from the US who hail from other countries on the continent, as long as they don’t have criminal histories”.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.
The US Department of Homeland Security said in June that third-country deportations – sending undocumented migrants from the US to countries other than their own – were necessary to expel people “so uniquely barbaric that their own countries won’t take them back”.
Critics have said the deportations are unnecessarily cruel. In July, the US flew five immigrants from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba to Eswatini – an absolute monarchy with a troubling record. Eswatini, the subject of a damning human rights report by the state department in 2023, said it had accepted the US deportees after “months of robust high-level engagements” with the US.
Though other administrations have conducted third-country removals, the Trump administration’s practice of sending immigrants to countries facing political and human rights crises have raised international alarm and condemnation.
Uganda, a US ally in east Africa, hosts nearly 2 million refugees and asylum-seekers, who mostly come from countries in the region such as Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Sudan.
