On April 1, 2026, after a 16-hour journey to East Africa, an aircraft carrying eight deportees from the United States landed at Entebbe, a windswept peninsula in Uganda, on the northern shore of Lake Victoria.
On the day of their arrival, mild sunshine and light showers beat a gentle rhythm across the town, which bears the lasting traces of the country’s colonial administration and hosts the official residence of the president’s family, squatting atop a lush green hill adjacent to the airport.
The eight people, a woman and seven men, barely knew each other beyond their shared harrowing experience of having been expelled from the United States and placed on a flight to an unknown destination after being held for days in American detention centers, according to Robert Okot, a human rights lawyer based in Uganda who spoke to the deportees on two occasions.
A group of human rights organizations asked Okot to offer legal services to the deportees, who spoke with him at the hotel. Most of the deportees hardly understood English, Uganda’s primary official language. They were mostly French-speaking, except one who spoke passable English. Okot relied on him for interpretation.
“They wore filthy clothes and had no money or means of contacting their loved ones,” Okot told the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ), a partner in the investigative consortium behind the Deportation Project, led by Forbidden Stories and including New Lines.
When they disembarked from the plane, the men were in handcuffs and leg chains, and were unshackled before the group was driven to a hotel in Mengo, a hilly suburb overlooking Kampala city, he said.
“Bringing them to a country like Uganda, where people are struggling to find decent work and where they are depending on handouts from people for a meal, was quite traumatic,” he said. “They had not been told what they were being taken for and had no idea where they were, and did not have means of communication and cash to spend.” Okot added that they looked gaunt and haggard.
The deportation and resulting trauma were the result of an Asylum Cooperative Agreement that the Ugandan government signed with the United States in July 2025.
The agreement seeks to ensure the “dignified, safe, and timely transfer from the United States of America to the Republic of Uganda of third-country nationals present in the United States of America who may seek protection against the return to their home country or country of former habitual residence.”
But the agreement’s execution appears to have breached international law and democratic commitments made by both governments. It illustrates the transactional approach to foreign policy adopted by the Trump administration and bolsters the Museveni government’s attempts to maintain its hold on power, according to some observers of the Ugandan scene.
Uganda. (Matrix Images)
Ugandan government officials declined repeated requests for comment from CCIJ and New Lines, but Moses Khisa, a Ugandan academic and associate professor of political science at North Carolina State University in the United States, had plenty to say.
“This [agreement] is needed in the present moment, with Uganda’s global standing waning and democratic credentials crashed, as the country has become more autocratic, with state abuses more egregious,” Khisa said. He added that at the same time the Trump administration was less interested in pressing for respect for civil rights and political freedoms around the world than its predecessors.
The Uganda Law Society and the East African Law Society filed a suit in the High Court in April 2026 seeking to nullify the agreement. “The admission into Uganda of third-country nationals under the agreement, without a publicly disclosed rights-compliant framework for individualized refugee status determination, violates several articles of the Constitution, the Refugees Act, and Uganda’s obligations under international human rights and refugee law,” the suit said.
Relevant provisions from the Bill of Rights include equality and freedom from discrimination; the protection of personal liberty in Chapter 4 of the Ugandan Constitution, which protects against inhumane treatment; the right to a fair hearing; and the constitution’s requirement that Parliament approve treaties.
Uganda Law Society President Isaac Ssemakadde said Ugandan courts will not entertain the matter, calling it another potential democratic offense. “As I understand it, it [the case] is considered to be highly politically sensitive,” said Ssemakadde, who fled to exile in March 2025. “No court wants to put it on the cause list. I think if I were in the country, I would suffer immediate retaliation for having authorized the filing of this litigation.”
On the American side, the decision to forcefully send deportees to faraway lands with a different culture and language raises questions about potential violations of U.S. obligations under the 1967 Protocol on the Status of Refugees, which the American Senate ratified in 1968.
Jurisprudence on mass deportations has evolved since the Nuremberg trials of Nazis held between 1945 and 1949, which categorized the forced deportations of Jews as crimes against humanity.
The International Criminal Court categorizes mass deportations as crimes against humanity, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court have outlawed forced deportations.
Unlike the United States, Uganda ratified the Rome Statute, binding it to comply with the provision that makes deportation or forcible transfer of a population a crime against humanity.
In August 2025, Uganda’s junior foreign affairs minister, Henry Oryem Okello, denied that the government had signed the accord with the United States. “To the best of my knowledge, we have not reached such an agreement,” Okello said. Uganda, he added, lacked “the facilities and infrastructure to accommodate” people deported under such an arrangement.
Permanent Secretary Vincent Waiswa Bagiire confirmed almost a year later that Uganda had entered an agreement with the United States. In a statement, Bagiire said the arrangement was made on the condition that no one be sent to a country where they could face torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment because of their migration status.
Ugandan officials also specified that the agreement was limited to deportees from other African countries.
President Yoweri Museveni removed Okello from government in a Cabinet reshuffle nine months after the Asylum Cooperative Agreement was signed. CCIJ has not established whether his removal was connected to his public comments about the agreement.
The deportees experienced dire consequences under the agreement.
Before their deportation, the eight faced several hurdles, including lacking access to lawyers, English interpreters and their families during detention. Okot said it took a while to trace the deportees: “They did not have access to information; we did not know where they were being kept, and they did not know whether they had any rights. They were at the mercy of two governments that chose to execute a secretive agreement.”
A July 2026 report by Human Rights First, titled “ Slammed Doors: Use of Asylum Cooperative Agreements to Unlawfully Reject Asylum Seekers,” gave the account of Yonas, a young man from Ethiopia who had escaped a repressive government at home. After fleeing to the United States, he was later arrested and spent nine months at a detention center.
According to the report, Yonas endured sexual abuse and was not provided with adequate interpretation in immigration court or at medical appointments while waiting for an immigration judge to decide his asylum case. Despite a “severe decline” in the man’s mental health, and even though a Human Rights First attorney presented evidence that sending him to Uganda would place him at risk of being returned to Ethiopia, the immigration judge ordered him removed to Uganda, the report said. He was lucky to be granted a bond much later, but his fellow asylum-seekers from the Horn of Africa faced a different fate.
Okot said another deportee from Ethiopia, who had earlier expressed the desire to seek asylum in Uganda, later fled to a neighboring country, Kenya. “During one of our conversations, he revealed that he was running out of funds and wanted to get a cellphone where he could receive money,” Okot said, adding that he and the deportees who remained in Uganda have lost contact with the man.
Okot revealed that deportees who were granted asylum were under immense pressure to leave the hotel because the Office of the Prime Minister had instructed the hotel management to eject them after two months’ stay. He speculated that the potential ejection may have prompted the Ethiopian man to leave for Kenya.
Officials from the Office of the Prime Minister did not respond to a request for comment about this assertion. But a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied the allegation, saying that the Ugandan government did not threaten to expel them from the hotel after two months.
Since their arrival in April, five out of the eight deportees have been voluntarily repatriated to their respective countries. Two have been granted asylum in Uganda, which hosts one of the largest refugee communities in Africa.
They face dim economic prospects. Uganda has the second-youngest population in the world, with about 75% below the age of 30, according to the United Nations Population Fund, and a soaring youth unemployment rate between 64% and 70%. This makes it nearly impossible for an asylum-seeker to find employment in Uganda.
The whole group of eight deportees “went through a lot; some of them had been under detention for some time in the U.S.,” Okot said. “From their narration, you realize that there were quite some procedural irregularities in their deportation, and of course it really shows how these individuals were very vulnerable to human rights violations.”
These violations are not limited to Uganda. Of the 13 African countries selected to host third-country nationals, the World Bank describes South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as “failed states,” Cameroon and Libya as “fragile” states, and the rest — including Uganda — as experiencing declines in democracy and the rule of law.
Ssemakadde argues that this means Uganda is not an appropriate destination for the deportees: “People are running away from the worst autocracies, the worst persecution. You can’t send them to Uganda to negotiate their fates here. Uganda doesn’t provide minimum conditions of security.”
CCIJ’s request for comment from Ugandan authorities went unanswered.
The Ugandan government received a measure of financial security in September 2026, when it signed an agreement with the United States for $1.7 billion until 2030 to bolster the nation’s ailing health sector.
Speaking at the signing ceremony at the Finance Ministry, Finance Minister Henry Musasizi described the agreement as “another significant milestone” in Uganda’s longstanding partnership with the United States. Musasizi said the support was part of America’s long-term contribution to Uganda’s health sector, particularly in the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria; the management of disease outbreaks; public health surveillance; and the strengthening of health commodity supply chains.
But other African countries, including the repressive Zimbabwean regime of Emmerson Mnangagwa, rejected a similar deal. “Zimbabwe was being asked to share its biological resources and data over an extended period, with no corresponding guarantee of access to any medical innovations — such as vaccines, diagnostics or treatments — that might result from that shared data,” said Nick Mangwana, a government spokesperson.
Zambia also rejected a potential health agreement with the United States. The deal required Zambia to provide pathogen data and undertake a “bilateral compact” granting the U.S. government access to critical minerals such as copper and cobalt.
The Ugandan government did not grant mineral access to the United States, but in July 2026 it did authorize the purchase of eight Boeing aircraft, to “grow and modernize its Uganda Airlines fleet.” The $985 million purchase from the largest American commercial aircraft manufacturer signals a shift away from European rival Airbus and Canadian manufacturer Bombardier. During the revival of the defunct Uganda Airlines, Bombardier supplied four planes in 2019, and Airbus supplied one aircraft in 2020 and another in 2021.
Such a deal could extend the lifespan of Museveni’s regime, backed by ethnic clientelism and military force, which has courted the United States over the past two decades as part of a broader survival strategy.
The Ugandan government’s inner sanctum comprises his brother, Gen. Salim Saleh; the first lady and minister of education, Janet Kataha Museveni; and his son, the chief of defence forces, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who is also the heir apparent to the throne.
The trio represents part of what the British academic Nic Cheeseman describes as the powerful shadow state — an informal network of domestic and international actors, most of whom are unelected or are not operating in their official capacity, who collude to assert and maintain political, social and economic control for their own benefit.
Museveni has a long history of currying favor with the United States. In 2007, he was the first African Head of State to embrace the U.S. government-led war on terror when he deployed the Ugandan army to fight al-Shabab insurgents.
The deployment came shortly after he won a disputed election against the opposition candidate, Kizza Besigye, in 2006. Canadian author Helen C. Epstein, in her book “Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror,” posits that “Museveni positioned himself as a vital democratic ally and a bulwark against Islamic extremism in East Africa.”
In exchange, Uganda has received billions of dollars in military and development aid from the United States and other Western powers. In 2018, Uganda was the seventh-largest recipient of U.S. aid, after Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, Kenya and Tanzania. Epstein argues that Museveni used the war chest to “fund political patronage, suppress domestic opposition, and maintain his grip on power.”
But the Museveni-led government ran into headwinds when the European Union and the Democratic-led American governments under presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden began demanding answers about gross human rights abuses, corruption, and the decline of democracy and the rule of law in Uganda.
In July 2015, Obama warned African leaders against clinging to power. “Nobody should be president for life,” he told those gathered at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa. The message was interpreted as a salvo at leaders such as Museveni.
The Ugandan government was rattled during Biden’s tenure in office between 2021 and 2025, when senior army, police and prison officers were sanctioned. Those sanctioned included the former deputy chief of defence forces, Lt. Gen. Peter Elwelu; the former head of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Abel Kandiho; and the commissioner general of prisons, Johnson Byabashaija. All were accused of torture and gross human rights violations. The sanctions also targeted politicians accused of graft, including the former speaker of Parliament, Anita Annet Among.
President Donald Trump’s Republican-led government returned to power in January 2025, introducing a new phase of transactional politics that appears to align well with the Ugandan government’s priorities.
In 2025, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed U.S. diplomats worldwide not to comment on the fairness or integrity of elections conducted by foreign countries. The order, sent to all U.S. diplomatic posts in a July 17 internal State Department cable, said the department would no longer issue election-related statements or social media posts from Washington unless there is a “clear and compelling” foreign policy interest.
In February 2026, the European Union Parliament called for an independent probe into crimes against humanity committed by Uganda’s military and political elite during the January 2026 presidential elections. The lawmakers questioned the credibility of the election, which was marred by violence, widespread intimidation, fraud and a nationwide internet blackout.
Despite U.S. Sen. Jim Risch, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calling the election a “hollow exercise,” and Democratic Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Cory Booker urging the Trump administration to take action against the Museveni government following the election, the American government did not comment on the election’s legitimacy.
In this context, some maintain that the asylum and health agreements offer Museveni’s presidency a new lease on life and the chance to placate the Trump-led administration. According to political analyst Nicholas Sengoba, the deals give the octogenarian the advantage of keeping a tight grip on power, away from the prying eyes of the U.S. State Department.
“The American government, which is an illiberal democracy, is playing to the gallery of the MAGA base and is less concerned about the fate of the deportees after they leave American soil. Uganda then becomes a dubious partner of the Americans, and in exchange, the Americans will turn a blind eye to the state of democracy and repression in Uganda,” Sengoba said.
This story was produced with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism (FIJ). It is part of an ongoing joint investigation between the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism and New Lines Magazine.