Trump Considers Deporting Migrants to Rwanda After the UK Decides Not To
The State Department is looking for new countries to take deportees, in part because domestic detention centers are expensive and short on space.
Demonstrators outside London Gatwick Airport protesting against a planned deportation of asylum-seekers from Britain to Rwanda in 2022.
Photographer: Toby Melville/Reuters
It only took one day in office last summer for newly appointed British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to jettison his predecessor’s controversial plan to deport UK asylum-seekers thousands of miles south to Rwanda. First floated by Conservatives in 2022, the UK’s “Rwanda scheme”—which triggered four voluntary removals but no wider expulsion—was “dead and buried before it started,” Starmer said in July at his first press conference from Downing Street, dismissing the whole thing as little more than a “gimmick.”
Now the US is picking up a version of the UK’s discarded playbook as it looks to add the African nation to a growing list of allies such as El Salvador, Mexico and—most recently—South Sudan that are open to accepting the Trump administration’s outflow of deportees.