UNITED STATES – On August 20, the U.S. deported twenty people to Liberia, with those deported including Venezuelans, Cubans, and Colombians. Liberia’s information minister stated that the country agreed to accept up to 1,200 deportees from the U.S. over the next year.
The U.S. and Liberia signed an Asylum Cooperative Agreement last year, which provides for the U.S. to deny immigrants applying for asylum and instead send them to Liberia to seek asylum. The U.S. has made deals with 35 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, to facilitate “third-country” deportations, the process of being sent to a country other than the immigrant’s home country or their place of original immigration. These deals include ACAs similar to the one between the U.S. and Liberia and other types of agreements, such as those where the U.S. sends deportees to a third country to eventually be transferred to their home country, with some being imprisoned in the meantime.
In many cases, the details of these agreements have not been disclosed publicly or have only been disclosed after deportations have already begun. The U.S. government has paid at least $49 million to these governments in connection with these agreements, and some agreements have been accepted by foreign governments as a condition for avoiding U.S. tariffs or the cancellation of humanitarian aid.
The payments facilitating the third-country deportations are handled by the Office of Remigration under the State Department. This office is shrouded in secrecy: the State Department does not list it on its website, and most details are only known through an anonymous source who spoke to Wired. The staff at the Office of Remigration process these payments without the usual oversight or transparency involved in federal funding.
Remigration is a concept that advocates for ethnic cleansing of non-white populations through mass deportations. The modern use of the term originates from the European far-right Identitarian movement and was adopted by the Trump government in its campaign for a second term. The term has frequently been used in social media posts by Trump and his arch-reactionary advisor Stephen Miller, as well as in official State Department releases.
In addition to violations of due process that are normalized in immigration proceedings, Trump’s strategy of third-party deportations violates the bourgeois-democratic principle of non-refoulement in international law. Some immigrants have been deported to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador, where prisoners are held in inhumane conditions. Members of the masses subject to third-country deportations are given no meaningful opportunity to present safety concerns, receiving as little as six hours’ notice before being deported to a country where they likely do not speak the local language and have no ties.
The international imperialist system, with the U.S. as its hegemon, relies upon an extensive and destructive system of exploitation of oppressed nations by the imperialist nations. The oppression and wars of aggression needed to maintain this system produce instability and waves of migration toward the imperialist countries from the semi-colonial ones. These migrants are then subject to State terror and super-exploitation in an effort to drive down wages domestically and maintain control of the working class. This process is a component part of the broader militarization of U.S. society and the fascistization of the capitalist democracies throughout the international imperialist system. Only the unity of the exploited and oppressed masses of the U.S. and the world can stand against it and build the forces of revolution necessary to end the imperialist system once and for all.
[Image Source: Liberian national police officers guard plane carrying migrants deported from the U.S. at the Roberts International Airport in Harbel, 56 km outside Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, August 20, 2026, Matthew Jacobs]
