OUAGADOUGOU – Burkina Faso has rejected a proposal from the United States to accept foreign nationals being deported as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
The Trump administration, which aims to deport millions of migrants who have entered the United States illegally, has been seeking to intensify removals to third countries, including several in Africa.
In September, Burkina Faso’s neighbour, Ghana, announced that its government had agreed to accept nationals from other West African countries. However, Burkina Faso’s Foreign Minister, Karamoko Jean-Marie Traoré, told a national radio station on Thursday evening that Ouagadougou had refused several attempts by the Trump administration to accept deportees from third countries.
“Burkina Faso is not a land for deportation,” Traoré said, describing the U.S. request as unworthy of consideration and lacking in propriety.
The push to deport migrants to third countries became a central pillar of Trump’s strategy to carry out the largest deportation operations in U.S. history, with reports suggesting Washington is planning to finalise agreements with 51 countries worldwide.
According to the U.S. news website Axios, the growing number of third-country deportation agreements shows a strong desire by the administration to pursue all possible avenues to fulfil Trump’s promise of removing record numbers of non-citizens.
The administration resumed deportation flights after the Supreme Court ruled last month that the Department of Homeland Security could continue sending migrants to countries that are not their homelands. The ruling lifted a lower court’s order that had required the administration to give migrants sufficient time to appeal their deportations.
The administration’s efforts to expand a process known as “expedited removal” across the United States were halted by a federal judge in late August. Judge Jia Cobb ruled that officials had violated migrants’ due process rights by expanding the policy.
U.S. authorities have carried out expedited removals for decades, but typically in limited cases for people apprehended near the southern border, usually within 100 miles and a 14-day period. The Trump administration sought to expand the practice nationwide to speed up the removal of people arrested deep within the country.
