\n<\/p>\n
When Liberia announced late last month that it would temporarily host Salvadoran national Kilmar Armando Abrego Garc\u00eda on \u201chumanitarian grounds\u201d if he were deported by the Trump administration for a second time, the West African country was broadcasting its unique history as a haven for Black migrants fleeing racism and economic servitude in the United States.<\/p>\n
According to the Liberian government, the decision to welcome Abrego Garc\u00eda, who was unlawfully deported from the United States in March only to return under a court injunction in June, follows its \u201clongstanding tradition of offering refuge to those in need\u201d.<\/p>\n
Liberia was once a semi-autonomous territory funded in part by the Washington, DC-based American Colonisation Society (ACS) comprising powerful white men who viewed free Blacks as a threat to slavery and saw emigration (deportation) as the only solution to dispose of them. Its founders \u2013 repatriates from the US and Caribbean who joined recaptives (Africans rescued aboard illegal slave ships) from the Congo River basin \u2013 rebuffed ACS largesse and declared the country independent in 1847.<\/p>\n
The free and formerly enslaved Blacks who founded Liberia were not unlike Abrego Garc\u00eda, who has become an international symbol of the dangers of presidential overreach. They, too, were pawns in white America\u2019s bid to \u201cmake America white again\u201d \u2013 as if it ever were just white \u2013 through the framing of Black and brown bodies as undesirable, threatening and therefore disposable.<\/p>\n
But the similarities end there. America once deported migrants of colour to Liberia, but not like this.<\/p>\n
Although Trump\u2019s impetus for mass expulsions \u2013 anti-migrant racism \u2013 aligns with the anti-Black bigotry of ACS agents who had deportationist sensibilities, Black people who opted to settle in Liberia did so primarily of their own volition. In fact, many paid for their emigration to West Africa in the 19th century.<\/p>\n
America\u2019s proposed deportation of Abrego Garc\u00eda to Liberia in the 21st century would be neither voluntary nor defensible, especially since he has explicitly requested relocation to Costa Rica instead. His high-profile case represents a litmus test for upholding due process and respecting human rights under Trump-era MAGA mania. By agreeing to host Abrego Garc\u00eda, Liberia has not only subjected itself to legal wrangling but also compromised its humanitarian credibility despite making vague assurances about consulting \u201crelevant national and international stakeholders\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is the latest country in Africa \u2013 a continent previously described in pejorative terms by Trump \u2013 to cave in to the first felon-in-chief\u2019s coercive tactics. The irony is that, as a convict himself, Trump, too, would be deported if he were a migrant of colour.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of countries under pressure to receive deportees from America are African. Eight men arrived in South Sudan in July after the majority-conservative US Supreme Court authorised their expulsion. As weeks of court disputes ensued thousands of miles away, nationals of Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Sudan and Vietnam were held under American military guard in a converted shipping container in Djibouti.<\/p>\n
Flights carrying other Black and brown deportees to Africa have followed in quick succession. In mid-July, after \u201cmonths of robust high-level engagements\u201d, five convicts from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen were banished to the small, landlocked kingdom of Eswatini in Southern Africa. Shortly after, in mid-August, seven deportees arrived in the post-genocide central African country of Rwanda, which has in recent years positioned itself as an outpost for migrants expelled from Euro-America.<\/p>\n
Deportation to third countries in Africa \u2013 or anywhere else for that matter \u2013 without due process is clearly a violation of human rights, even if the United States justifies ridding itself of alleged criminals by any means. Before enlisting Liberia\u2019s cooperation most recently, the White House had been aggressively courting countries as diverse as Uganda, Libya, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania to host Abrego Garc\u00eda. All of them are in Africa, and heads of state from the latter three countries attended Trump\u2019s US-Africa summit held in July.<\/p>\n
It appears the carrot of possibly benefiting from American commercial diplomacy followed the stick of accepting its deportees. But not all countries in Africa have complied when urged to do so. For instance, Nigeria \u2013 considered West Africa\u2019s regional powerhouse \u2013 refused to kowtow to Trump, citing national security concerns. If a powerful ally can snub Washington\u2019s request, why would its continental neighbours acquiesce?<\/p>\n
Although negotiations between the Trump administration and African governments have been largely shrouded in secrecy, countries that opt to take in deportees surely must be leveraging this diplomatically to secure concessions of their own, including the removal of US visa bans, the elimination of punishing tariffs, and the extraction of critical minerals for profit to power American technology ambitions.<\/p>\n
Liberia appears to have been rewarded for its compliance. Following bilateral meetings held in October between American Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Liberian Foreign Minister Sara Beysolow Nyanti, Washington\u00a0announced<\/a> that, effectively immediately, it would extend the validity of certain non-immigrant visas issued to Liberians from one to three years with multiple entries permitted. This was a privilege Monrovia granted American citizens, but reciprocal arrangements were halted during Liberia\u2019s protracted armed conflict from 1989 to 2003. Since Liberia has one of the highest US visa rejection rates in the world, the new extension policy may have been an allowance for agreeing to host Abrego Garc\u00eda.<\/p>\n Washington\u2019s inclusion of Monrovia in the much-touted US-Africa summit held this July may have been prompted by Liberia\u2019s signing of a concession and access agreement with American mineral exploration company Ivanhoe Atlantic. Pending legislative approval, the\u00a01.8 billion-dollar agreement<\/a>\u00a0would enable Ivanhoe to export Guinea\u2019s iron ore using Liberia\u2019s rail corridor. US companies have a chequered history in Liberia, though, so the concession has generated worthy\u00a0speculation<\/a>\u00a0about its feasibility.<\/p>\n Despite the faulty assumption that Liberia has a \u201cspecial relationship\u201d with the United States, America\u2019s contempt for the West African nation knows no bounds. The US was one of the last countries to recognise Liberia\u2019s independence \u2013 in 1862. American companies Firestone and LAMCO pillaged Liberia\u2019s rubber and iron ore for decades with the complicity of local elites. US Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen dismissed Liberia as being of \u201cno strategic interest\u201d when war ravaged the country in the 1990s. And Trump asked Liberia\u2019s President Joseph Boakai where he learned to speak \u201csuch good English<\/a>\u201d during a cringeworthy White House exchange in July.<\/p>\n Washington\u2019s recent proposal to deport Abrego Garc\u00eda to Monrovia is the latest blunder in US-Liberia relations.<\/p>\n