KAMPALA: Uganda has agreed to receive migrants who do not qualify to remain in the United States, a foreign ministry official said on Thursday, in Washington’s latest attempt to speed up deportations.

US President Donald Trump’s administration has negotiated arrangements to send people to third countries, among them El Salvador and Eswatini, which have been fiercely criticised by rights groups.

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.

“The agreement is in respect of Third Country Nationals who may not be granted asylum in the United States, but are reluctant to or may have concerns about returning to their countries of origin,” the Ugandan foreign affairs ministry’s permanent secretary, Vincent Bagiire, said in a statement on X.

He said it was a “temporary arrangement”, which specified that “individuals with criminal records and unaccompanied minors will not be accepted”. Bagiire 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 added. The UN’s refugee agency notes that Uganda — led by President Museveni Yoweri, who has held power for almost four decades — 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 Congo.

Fears of torture risks

Kampala’s announcement of the agreement comes a day after the country denied any such deal existed. It also comes after Rwanda said it would receive up to 250 migrants earlier this month.

Kigali is yet to give any further details of that agreement, which Washington has not confirmed. However, the Trump administration has struck a deal with South Sudan.

The impoverished and increasingly fragile nation accepted a group of eight migrant criminals from the US earlier this year. Only one of them is South Sudanese. Though their extradition was fought in the American court system, South Sudan confirmed in July that its government had care of the men, without giving further details.

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has taken a number of actions aimed at speeding up deportations of undocumented migrants to countries that are not their own. His administration 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.

Trump’s administration has defended the deportations, arguing that the home nations of some of those targeted for removal sometimes refuse to accept them. But 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.

Published in Dawn, August 22th, 2025