Uganda has agreed to take in nationals from third countries who may not get asylum in the United States but do not wish to return to their countries of origin, Kampala’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
The ministry said on Thursday that the agreement is based on the conditions that those seeking asylum do not have criminal records and that they are not unaccompanied minors, adding that details of the deal are still being worked out.
US President Donald Trump aims to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, with his administration seeking to increase removals to third countries, including by sending convicted criminals to South Sudan and the southern African kingdom of Eswatini.
At roughly 1.7 million, Uganda already hosts the largest refugee population in Africa, according to the United Nations, and is the latest East African country to announce such a deal with Washington, joining Rwanda and South Sudan.
“This is a temporary arrangement with conditions including that individuals with criminal records and unaccompanied minors will not be accepted,” Vincent Bagiire Waiswa, the ministry’s permanent secretary, said in a statement.
He also stated Uganda’s preference that “individuals from African countries shall be the ones transferred to Uganda”.
“The two parties are working out the detailed modalities on how the agreement shall be implemented,” he said.
It was not clear if the agreement had been signed, but the ministry statement said it had been “concluded”.
The announcement comes a day after a senior Ugandan official denied media reports saying that the country had agreed to take in people deported from the US, saying it lacked the facilities to accommodate them.
Foreign Affairs Minister Henry Okello Oryem told the Associated Press news agency that while Uganda has a benevolent refugee policy, there are limits.
“We are talking about cartels: people who are unwanted in their own countries. How can we integrate them into local communities in Uganda?” he asked.
He said the government was in discussions about “visas, tariffs, sanctions, and related issues, not accepting illegal aliens from the US. That would be unfair to Ugandans”.
The UN’s refugee agency notes that Uganda has a “progressive refugee policy, maintaining an open-door approach to asylum”.
However, the country also saw a “significant” increase in arrivals in 2024, it said, primarily as a result of Sudan’s civil war, but also unrest in South Sudan and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has taken a number of actions aimed at speeding up deportations of undocumented migrants to third countries.
In July, the US deported five men with criminal backgrounds to Eswatini and sent eight more to South Sudan.
Trump’s administration also deported hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador, where they were kept in a high-security jail with poor conditions before being returned to Venezuela.
Rights experts have warned that the deportations risk breaking international law by sending people to countries where they face the risk of torture, abduction and other abuses.
