United States and Liberia signed asylum protection-claims agreement

The United States and Liberia signed an "Agreement to Cooperate in the Examination of Protection Claims" via an exchange of notes at Monrovia on September 10, 2025, which entered into force the same day, according to the State Department's own treaty text. As of this filing, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies reports DHS has signed the agreement but not yet invoked it to transfer anyone, distinguishing it from Asylum Cooperative Agreements with other countries DHS has actively used to pretermit pending asylum cases.

Weeks after the agreement took effect, on October 17, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Liberia's Foreign Minister, and on October 24, 2025 Liberia agreed to accept Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the man wrongly deported to El Salvador's CECOT prison earlier in the administration and later returned to the U.S. — "on a strictly humanitarian and temporary basis." A separate ICE flight to Liberia on January 22, 2026 may have carried additional third-country nationals under the broader agreement, though this has not been independently confirmed.

Updates

2026-08-18 — Agreement scaled to active use, up to 1,200 deportees [4, 5]

Liberia's government confirmed it will accept up to 1,200 third-country deportees from the United States under the agreement, with a first group of 20 expected within days. Liberia's Information Minister Jerolinmek Piah said deportees are received "as guests of the Republic" and remain free to leave the country. The arrangement is one of more than 35 country-level agreements under which the U.S. had sent roughly 22,000 third-country deportees to 26 countries as of early August 2026.