US State Department adds Central African Republic to its third-country deportation program

The U.S. State Department has arranged for the Central African Republic to accept migrants of other nationalities deported by the United States, two sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on June 7, 2026. The agreement was negotiated at a May 18 meeting in Bangui between Central African officials and a US delegation led by Christian Jové Ehrhardt, the State Department's deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. A Central African government official confirmed the arrangement — "Central African Republic will indeed take in, within the framework of agreements with the US, immigrants deported by American authorities" — and a regional diplomat separately corroborated it. The precise date the agreement was finalized has not been disclosed; this entry is dated to the documented May 18 US negotiation rather than to the June 7 Reuters report.

The deal extends a third-country removal program under which Washington has already sent deportees to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Equatorial Guinea, under opaque arrangements that Senate Democrats say have cost tens of millions of dollars. In many cases the people removed had secured legal protections from US immigration courts against repatriation to their home countries; rights groups say routing them to unrelated third countries circumvents those protections. The International Organization for Migration — awarded $85 million this year by the US for operations in the Central African Republic — confirmed it would assist deportees on arrival. The Department of Homeland Security said all deportees receive full due process and referred questions about the agreement to the State Department, which did not respond to requests for comment.

That removals were already being attempted before the deal became public underscores that this is an operational expansion, not a hypothetical one: on May 22, US District Judge Lee Rosenthal issued a temporary restraining order blocking the deportation of a Turkish national whom US officials had planned to send to the Central African Republic on May 26. Neither Central African officials nor the regional diplomat could say how many migrants the country — where most of the 5.5 million population lives in poverty after repeated cycles of unrest — will receive, what their nationalities will be, or when flights will begin.