Last year, when Donald Trump invited a select group of African leaders to the White House, Liberian President Joseph Boakai found himself on the receiving end of one of those remarks that can sound like a compliment until you reflect on them.

“You speak such good English,” Trump told him, before asking: “Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?”

Boakai did what any courteous visitor would do when confronted with an awkward question from the host. He politely explained that he had learnt it in Liberia – a country that, Trump should know, was established in 1822 through the efforts of the American Colonization Society and uses English as its official language.

That moment was quickly absorbed into the Internet’s archive of Trump’s curiosities about Africa, alongside incidents such as his reference to Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard about” when addressing Congress about US foreign assistance in 2025.

Now, more than a year after Boakai’s White House visit, Trump has made another ‘discovery’ about Liberia: it is willing to take migrants the US wants out of its borders. Under a deal that came to light last month, Liberia is to receive 1 200 third-country deportees from the US over the next 12 months, with the first batch of 20 – comprising Cubans, Brazilians and Cameroonians – having arrived in Monrovia last month.

Since mid-2025, the Trump administration has deported an estimated 23 000 people to countries other than those they hailed from under its expanding third-country removal scheme.

Like the 23 000-odd deportees before them, the new arrivals in Monrovia do not have any familial, cultural or historical connection to their new host country – Liberia just happened to be the country that has agreed to receive them.

What distinguishes Liberia from previous African recipients of America’s unwanted guests is the sheer number involved. South Sudan received eight, Rwanda seven, Eswatini 15, Uganda 12, the Democratic Republic of Congo 15, Sierra Leone 32, Cameroon 36, the Central African Republic 49, Equatorial Guinea 53, and Ghana – the birthplace of Kwame Nkrumah, that great pan-Africanist – 60. He must be turning in his grave.

Against this backdrop, 1 200 starts to look less like a number and more like a statement of how far Liberia is prepared to go in accommodating America’s deportation policy. Even allowing for the fact that this figure is a ceiling rather than a number already delivered, it is a remarkable commitment. Liberia is assuming responsibility for a population large enough to require a system: accommodation, documentation, healthcare, legal administration, security and, eventually, decisions about what happens to people whose lives have suddenly acquired a Liberian dimension.

The obvious question is whether Liberia is equipped for the task. To be fair, the West African country is not being left to its own devices, with the US expected to provide financial and other assistance.

This is precisely where the arrangement needs scrutiny: if American money is required to enable Liberia to receive people deported from the US, the real question we should be asking is not simply whether Liberia is being paid to say yes, but whether the resources attached to the deal are sufficient to ensure that the people arriving in Monrovia are treated as human beings with rights rather than as administrative packages moved from one jurisdiction to another.

What should worry us more as Africans, however, is not simply that Boakai’s government has agreed to take 1 200 people the Trump administration doesn’t want. It’s that Liberia is joining a steadily expanding African reception network. The more countries participate, the easier it becomes for third-country deportations to acquire the appearance of normal migration management rather than what it actually is: the outsourcing of a difficult domestic policy problem.

Once a practice becomes normal, the numbers tend to increase: eight (the size of the first batch of deportees to South Sudan in June 2025) becomes 15, 30 becomes 60, and eventually a country is discussing 1 200. The number could reach dozens of thousands before we know it.

That’s why I applaud the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights for consistently raising the alarm each time news of Africa-bound US deportees breaks.

But the commission’s human rights concerns need to move from the language of rights monitoring into the political arena. The voices of those at the highest levels of the African Union hierarchy must be heard too.