By Solomon "Customs" Bridges
The first plane is due Thursday. Twenty people aboard, none of them Liberian, all of them bound for a country most have never seen.
Liberia has agreed to accept 1,200 third-country deportees from the United States, according to NPR News. The arrangement is not new in shape — Washington has for years leaned on smaller, poorer nations to absorb migrants whose home countries won't take them back — but the scale here is notable. The deportees will include Africans as well as nationals of North America, South America and the Caribbean, NPR reports.
Liberia's own story with the United States runs deep. The country was founded in the 19th century by freed and formerly enslaved Black Americans, and its capital, Monrovia, still carries the name of a U.S. president. That history gives the current deal an edge that similar arrangements with other nations don't carry.
What isn't yet clear from available reporting: the terms of the agreement, what Liberia receives in exchange, or how the deportees — many with no ties to the country — will be housed, processed or resettled once they land. NPR's report does not detail any compensation structure, and no other outlet in hand adds those specifics. Readers should treat the financial and logistical particulars as unconfirmed until more reporting surfaces.
Third-country deportation deals have become a fixture of U.S. immigration policy in recent years, with nations from Central America to Africa signing on, often under diplomatic or economic pressure that rarely makes it into the press release. Liberia's decision to take in a group this size puts a small, still-recovering economy — one that has weathered civil war and Ebola in living memory — squarely in the middle of another country's enforcement strategy.
The first 20 arrivals land Thursday. The other 1,180 are still, for now, just a number on a memo.
Nothing happens 'over there' anymore.
— Compiled from reporting by NPR News.
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