May 3, 2025
According to a Rwandan official, discussions over potential financial compensation are expected to take place within the next two weeks.
The Rwandan government and the Trump administration are in talks about a possible agreement that would allow Kigali to accept deportees from the United States—including Africans and other non-Rwandan nationals—CBS News has learned.
According to a Rwandan official, discussions over potential financial compensation and other logistical details are expected to take place within the next two weeks. Both U.S. and Rwandan officials confirmed that negotiations are underway regarding the transfer of third-country nationals deported from the U.S. to Rwanda.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been very vocal about the Trump administration’s desire to send people to other countries, even countries those people may not necessarily be from.
“We are working with other countries to say, ‘We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings,’” he said during a televised cabinet meeting as he sat next to Donald Trump. Rubio also said that the “further away from America, the better.”
A similar arrangement with El Salvador, under which certain deportees are imprisoned at that country’s notorious CECOT prison, has led to a number of lawsuits against the Trump administration.
However, other countries, like Panama and Mexico, whose president Claudia Sheinbaum, has publicly cast herself as an opponent of Trump, have agreed to accept deportees who are not from those countries.
According to a 2024 article from The Washington Post, Rwanda, like El Salvador, has been accused of violating the human rights of its citizens by arresting and torturing the families of its exiled citizens who are critics of the country. Furthermore, according to UN investigators, the Rwandan government is accused of backing a rebel group as well as the suppression and murder, arrest, or disappearance of its political opponents.
According to their more recent reporting, Rwanda has been lobbying itself as a destination for deportations of people who are not Rwandan for years, which voices critical of the Rwandan government have described as an attempt to launder their reputation as a place where human rights abuses are rampant.
According to a United States official who worked on Rwandan relations in the Biden administration, “The cozier that Rwanda gets to the Trump administration, the less likely they are going to press them to make concessions,” likely giving them leverage in the peace talks the Trump administration is attempting between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.
Jeffery Smith, the executive director of a pro-democracy nonprofit, Vanguard Africa, described any plan to deport immigrants to Rwanda as “morally and legally reprehensible, to the Post before continuing, “this is merely a ploy to garner positive headlines and a cynical way in which to compel Western governments, like the U.S., to look the other way when inevitable human rights abuses are committed.”
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