Uganda has dismissed reports that it reached an agreement with the United States to receive undocumented migrants deported from the country, contradicting claims that surfaced earlier this week.
According to a CBS News report citing internal US government documents, Washington had secured bilateral deportation deals with Honduras and Uganda as part of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The report suggested that Uganda had agreed to accept an unspecified number of African and Asian migrants who had sought asylum at the US-Mexico border, provided they did not have criminal records.
But Uganda’s state minister for foreign affairs, Henry Oryem Okello, told Reuters that no such agreement exists. He stressed that Uganda neither has the infrastructure nor the capacity to accommodate deported migrants from the United States.
“To the best of my knowledge we have not reached such an agreement. We do not have the facilities and infrastructure to accommodate such illegal immigrants in Uganda. So, we cannot take in such illegal immigrants,” Oryem said.
The White House has not publicly clarified the reports, and US officials have faced growing questions over the policy of third-country deportations — transferring undocumented migrants to countries other than their homelands.
In June, the US Department of Homeland Security defended the practice, saying such removals were necessary to expel individuals “so uniquely barbaric that their own countries won’t take them back.”
Human rights groups, however, have condemned the policy as unnecessarily cruel and potentially unlawful under international conventions.
The Trump administration has already carried out controversial deportations, including sending five migrants from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba to Eswatini in July.
Eswatini, which has faced criticism over its human rights record, said it accepted the deportees after “months of robust high-level engagements” with Washington.
Though previous administrations have conducted third-country removals, rights experts argue that Trump’s approach — striking deals with nations facing political and human rights challenges — risks putting vulnerable migrants in further danger.
Uganda, considered a key US ally in East Africa, currently hosts nearly two million refugees and asylum-seekers, mainly from neighbouring countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Sudan.
Officials in Kampala maintain that this existing burden makes it impossible to accommodate additional migrants deported from the US.
