Dozen people arrive under new deal but legal challenges expected with scheme criticised as ‘dehumanising process’

A flight carrying people being deported from the US has landed in Uganda, as Donald Trump’s administration pushes on with its strategy of expelling migrants to countries they have no ties to.

The deported people would stay in the east African country as “a transition phase for potential onward transmission to other countries”, an unnamed senior Ugandan government official told Reuters.

The Uganda Law Society, which condemned the arrivals, said 12 people were on the flight, the first under an agreement Uganda signed with the US in August. No other details of the deportees, including their nationalities, have been made public.

The US has already deported dozens of people to third countries. Other African countries that have accepted or agreed to accept deportees include Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda and South Sudan which have received people from as far afield as Cuba, Jamaica, Yemen, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.