Rwanda has said it will accept up to 250 migrants from the US in a deal agreed with President Donald Trump’s administration.
Under the scheme the deportees would be given “workforce training, health care, and accommodation to jump start their lives in Rwanda”, government spokesperson Yolande Makolo confirmed to the BBC.
A condition of the agreement was that Rwanda would have “the ability to approve each individual proposed for resettlement”, she added.
The White House has not commented on the deal directly but told the BBC it was constantly talking to countries “willing to assist us in removing the illegal aliens that [ex-President] Joe Biden” had allowed to “infiltrate” the US.
Since Trump came back into power in January, he has focused on a sweeping mass deportation scheme to remove undocumented migrants from the US quickly, a key election promise.
Murmurs of a deal between Rwanda and the US came out in May, after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington was “actively searching” for a country to take some of what he described as the “some of the most despicable human beings”.
The Trump administration has been courting several African countries to accept deported migrants whose home countries have refused to take them back. Eswatini and South Sudan have recently accepted some, including deportees who are convicted criminals.
Ms Makolo told the BBC that Rwanda had gone ahead with the deal with the US because “nearly every Rwandan family has experienced the hardships of displacement”.
She added that Rwandan society values were founded “on reintegration and rehabilitation”.
This echoed comments from May when Rwanda’s foreign affairs minister said the country, which went through a genocide in the mid-1990s, was led in the “spirit” of giving “another chance to migrants who have problems across the world”.
Under a deal agreed with the UN refugee agency and African Union six years ago, nearly 3,000 refugees and asylum seekers trapped in Libya were evacuated to Rwanda between September 2019 and April 2025. The UN says many of these people have subsequently been resettled elsewhere.
Rwanda had a deal with the UK, agreed with the Conservative government in 2022, to accept asylum seekers.
But the UK scrapped the scheme, which faced numerous legal challenges, after Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government took office in July last year.
The UK had paid Rwanda £240m ($310m), even building places to house the asylum seekers. It is not clear what has happened to these facilities.
The Reuters news agency reported that an unnamed Rwandan official had said the US would give Kigali an unspecified grant as part of the deal, but this has not been confirmed.
Ms Makolo told the BBC that more details would be provided once they had been worked out.
Human rights experts have raised concerns that removals to a nation that is not a migrant’s place of origin – known as a third country – could violate international law.
Rwanda has previously been criticised for its human rights record, including the risk that those sent to the East African nation could be deported again to countries where they may face danger.
But Rwanda’s government maintains it can provide a safe place for migrants.
The country has also come under fire for backing the M23 rebel group embroiled in the conflict in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo – an accusation it has denied.
In June, a ceasefire deal was signed in Washington by Rwanda and DR Congo as part of an ongoing peace process aimed at ending three decades of instability in the region.
Additional reporting from the BBC’s Barbara Plett Usher in Nairobi and Bernd Debusmann Jr at the White House
Source: BBC
