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 Makole 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.