When Liberia announced late last month that it would temporarily take in Salvadoran national Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia on “humanitarian grounds” if he were to be deported for the second time by the Trump administration, the West African country was broadcasting its unique history as a haven for black immigrants fleeing racial discrimination and economic servitude in the United States.
The Liberian government said the decision to welcome Abrego Garcia, who was illegally deported from the United States in March but returned following a court injunction in June, follows a “long-standing tradition of providing shelter to those in need.”
Liberia was once a semi-autonomous territory, funded in part by the Washington, DC-based American Colonization Society (ACS). The ACS was made up of powerful white men who viewed free blacks as a threat to slavery and saw emigration (deportation) as the only solution to getting rid of them. Its founders, American and Caribbean returnees who joined the Congo River Valley POWs (Africans rescued aboard illegal slave ships), rebuffed ACS pressure and declared the country’s independence in 1847.
The free black and former slave who founded Liberia is not unlike Abrego Garcia, who has become an international symbol of the dangers of presidential tyranny. They, too, were pawns in white America’s effort to “make America white again” by framing black and brown bodies as undesirable, threatening, and therefore disposable, as if they were once just white people.
But that’s where the similarities end. The United States has previously deported immigrants of color to Liberia, but not this time.
While President Trump’s push for mass deportation, anti-immigrant racism, is consistent with the anti-Black bias of ACS officials with deportationist sensibilities, the Black people who chose to settle in Liberia did so largely of their own free will. In fact, many people paid to emigrate to West Africa in the 19th century.
In the 21st century, the United States’ proposed deportation of Mr. Abrego Garcia to Liberia would not be voluntary or defensible, especially since he has explicitly requested that he move to Costa Rica instead. His high-profile case represents a litmus test for adherence to due process and respect for human rights under the MAGA mania of the Trump era. By agreeing to host Abrego Garcia, Liberia not only exposed itself to legal controversy but also undermined its humanitarian credibility despite vague promises to consult with “domestic and international stakeholders.”
It is the latest country on the African continent that President Trump previously described in derogatory terms to succumb to the coercive tactics of a felon commander in chief. Ironically, Trump himself is a convict and would be deported if he were an immigrant of color.
Africa is a “dumping ground” for deportees from the US
The majority of countries under pressure from the US to take in deportees are African. The eight men arrived in South Sudan in July after the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court upheld their expulsion. Citizens of Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Sudan and Vietnam were held under U.S. military guard in a converted shipping container in Djibouti during a weeks-long legal battle thousands of miles away.
Flights are also continuing to deport other black and brown people to Africa. In mid-July, five prisoners from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen were deported to Eswatini, a small landlocked kingdom in southern Africa, after “months of intense high-level involvement.” Shortly after, in mid-August, seven deportees arrived in the post-genocide Central African country of Rwanda. In recent years, the country has established itself as an outpost for migrants expelled from Europe and America.
No matter how justified the United States is in removing criminal suspects, deporting them to third countries in Africa or elsewhere without due process is clearly a violation of human rights. Before recently enlisting Liberia’s help, the White House was actively lobbying countries as diverse as Uganda, Libya, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, and Mauritania to host Aburego Garcia. All are located in Africa, and the leaders of the latter three countries attended President Trump’s U.S.-Africa Summit in July.
The carrot of potentially benefiting from U.S. trade diplomacy appears to have followed the stick of hosting the exiles. However, not all African countries responded to the request. For example, Nigeria, considered a regional power in West Africa, refused to bow down to President Trump, citing national security concerns. If powerful allies can ignore Washington’s requests, why do our continental neighbors acquiesce?
What’s in it for Liberia, and for Africa?
Although negotiations between the Trump administration and African governments are largely shrouded in secrecy, countries that choose to accept deportees are no doubt using them diplomatically to secure concessions for their countries, such as lifting U.S. visa bans, eliminating punitive tariffs, and extracting critical minerals for the benefit of advancing U.S. technological ambitions.
Liberia appears to have been rewarded for its compliance. Following bilateral talks held in October between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Liberian Foreign Minister Sarah Beisolow Nyanti, Washington announced virtually immediately that the validity period of certain nonimmigrant visas issued to Liberians would be extended from one to three years, with multiple entry permitted. This was a privilege Monrovia granted to American citizens, but the reciprocal agreement was suspended during Liberia’s protracted armed conflict from 1989 to 2003. Liberia has one of the highest U.S. visa denial rates in the world, so the new extension may have been a move to get Abrego-Garcia to agree.
Washington’s inclusion of Monrovia at the much-publicized U.S.-Africa summit in July may have been prompted by Liberia’s concession and access agreement with U.S. mineral exploration company Ivanhoe Atlantic. Pending Congressional approval, the $1.8 billion deal will allow Ivanhoe to export Guinean iron ore using Liberia’s rail corridor. But U.S. companies have a checkered history in Liberia, so the concessions have given rise to valuable speculation about their feasibility.
Despite the false assumption that Liberia has a “special relationship” with the United States, America’s disdain for the West African country knows no bounds. The United States was one of the last countries to recognize Liberia’s independence in 1862. American companies Firestone and Ramco, with the complicity of local elites, plundered Liberia’s rubber and iron ore for decades. When Liberia was ravaged by war in the 1990s, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen dismissed it as “not a strategic interest.” And in a cringe-worthy exchange at the White House in July, President Trump asked Liberian President Joseph Boakai where he learned “such good English.”
Washington’s recent proposal to expel Abrego Garcia to Monrovia is the latest failure in U.S.-Liberian relations.
If Trump had lived in the 1800s, he probably would have had kinship with the deportationists of the American Colonization Society. But we are no longer in the 19th century. As a country that has “historically extended protection and goodwill to individuals and communities in need,” Liberia would do well to remember that it is a sovereign nation whose policy decisions should not be shaped by the whims of racist white men.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
