South Sudan has told the Trump administration that it would consider accepting many more migrants deported from the U.S., but it has some requests of its own.
The East African nation has urged the Trump administration to lift sanctions on one of its top officials, according to three people familiar with the matter and diplomatic correspondence viewed by POLITICO. The people, like others in this story, were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy and ongoing negotiations.
South Sudanese officials have also asked the Trump administration to walk back sweeping visa revocations for its citizens that Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued in April, to reactivate a bank account at the New York Federal Reserve that allows the country to conduct transactions in dollars and to support its efforts to prosecute South Sudan’s first vice president, Riek Machar, who is being held under house arrest.
The Trump administration has not agreed to any of those requests — and Juba has a steep hill to climb to improve relations with the U.S. after years of tensions amid civil war, a slide into authoritarianism and systemic human rights violations.
“South Sudan will continue to be an ally of the United States, support the policies of the United States, and especially the policies of the current president, his excellency, President Donald Trump,” South Sudanese Ambassador to Washington Santino Dicken said in an interview. “But mostly, we would love also that our partners in the administration understand that as for the government of South Sudan, to convince its citizens freely…we are asking the U.S. administration to lift visa restrictions on South Sudanese passport holders.”
After a six-week-long legal battle, the U.S. this month completed the deportations of eight men to South Sudan, only one of whom is from that country, part of an administration-wide effort to deport thousands of people to third-party countries when their home countries refuse to take them back. The eight men have been placed in a guarded complex in South Sudan while its government works to repatriate them to their home countries, according to two of the people.
The State Department has not officially requested to move more people to South Sudan, but the ongoing talks with South Sudanese officials — a delegation including the foreign minister met with senior Africa adviser Massad Boulos and other top U.S. officials earlier this month — offer a glimpse into how various governments see Trump’s aggressive immigration strategy as a chance to improve standing with the U.S. and leverage their own requests. And it helps explain why the Trump administration — in its quest to find stopover nations for various asylum seekers and convicted criminals — is turning to Africa, a continent where administration officials feel they can make deals.
Trump or his aides have raised the prospect of sending such deportees at every meeting with African leaders, according to one of the three people familiar with the asks, and the Department of Homeland Security this month sent five men to Eswatini, a country of 1.2 million people bordering South Africa. The administration is also in talks with Rwanda to accept asylum seekers and other migrants who cannot return home, according to the three people familiar with the matter and a fourth person with insight into the negotiations.
“These are countries that are keen to appease the administration…because they want something back,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, an independent, nonpartisan think tank. “So whether it is tariff concessions — or in the case of African countries, many of them are under the threat of being placed under a travel ban or their diplomats will be prevented from coming from the U.S. — these are the stakes that are all being used to get these agreements, to get these countries to accept the nationals. And they also get paid.”
A White House official would not comment on the “private discussions” with South Sudan, but said administration officials meet with foreign governments regularly to “discuss many matters.”
The South Sudan deal is not a formal agreement, but the administration has transmitted written deals with Eswatini and El Salvador to Congress, according to a separate person familiar with the matter.
The president and his team have made such requests of at least 15 African countries, according to media reports, including Eswatini and South Sudan, though not every leader has been as amenable as the South Sudanese.
Nigeria’s foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, told local outlet Channels Television this month that African countries are under “considerable pressure” to accept deported Venezuelans, “some straight out of prison.”
“It will be difficult for a country like Nigeria to accept Venezuelan prisoners,” he said. “We have enough problems of our own,” noting the pressures of his nation’s ballooning population of 230 million people.
Finding countries willing to accept a significant number of migrant deportees — some of whom have been convicted of violent crimes — is crucial to the Trump administration’s agenda. While both Democrats and Republicans have deported people to countries where they have no previous connection, the scale of the Trump administration’s effort is without precedent.
That has sparked concerns from immigration lawyers and human-rights advocates who worry this administration is sending deportees to countries with a history of human rights violations, including South Sudan, a nation the State Department has warned Americans is too dangerous for all but essential personnel, and El Salvador, where migrants were sent to the country’s notorious mega-prison.
These places have been information black holes with lawyers, family members and lawmakers struggling to get specifics about migrants’ conditions or details on the agreements between the Trump administration and foreign governments.
According to an analysis by The Guardian, the U.S. has sent 8,100 people to countries not their own, mostly to Mexico, since Trump took office. While the U.S. has paid El Salvador and Eswatini to accept migrant deportees, South Sudan hopes its acceptance will pave the way for the Trump administration to consider some of its requests and to improve its standing with the United States.
The U.S. is the largest donor of humanitarian aid to South Sudan, which depends on the U.S. for financial support and help mediating its internal conflicts. That’s why the country is likely to accept more migrants regardless of whether the U.S. heeds its requests, according to two of the three people familiar with the matter.
Negotiations between South Sudanese officials and the U.S. started soon after Rubio revoked all visas for South Sudanese passport holders in April and blocked new arrivals because the country would not accept nationals expelled from the U.S.
Shortly after, South Sudan agreed to accept eight deportees from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar and Vietnam as a gesture of goodwill. The Trump administration in May extended Temporary Protected Status for South Sudanese immigrants for six months, a move that conflicts with the president’s sweeping efforts to strip most nationalities of temporary deportation relief and work permits.
But the U.S. also recently renewed sanctions against Benjamin Bol Mel, South Sudan’s de facto number two official and leading contender to succeed its ailing president, over his alleged corruption and mismanagement of public resources.
That could give South Sudan an extra incentive to cooperate with U.S. demands.
“Most countries that the U.S. is talking to to take migrants, they don’t have a sanctioned would-be-next president,” said one of the three people familiar with the negotiations. “They have a particular incentive in getting along with us.”
In a diplomatic note from South Sudan to the U.S. Embassy in Juba dated May 12, the country agreed to accept third country nationals from the United States and raised several matters of concern it hoped the U.S. would consider.
That included “a request for the removal of individual targeted sanctions imposed on senior
government officials of the Republic of South Sudan, specially His Excellency Dr. Benjamin Bol Mel.” It also asked the U.S. to lift the April visa restrictions, invest in oil, gas, minerals and other areas in South Sudan and the request to support the prosecution of Riek Machar, the country’s first vice president and a rival of the current president who is under house arrest.
The State Department declined to comment on its request to send migrants to South Sudan but said in a statement, “We remain unwavering in our commitment to end illegal and mass migration and bolster America’s border security. In some cases, we might work with other countries to facilitate the removal from the United States of nationals of third countries who have no legal basis to remain here.”
The State Department also called on South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir to “reverse the house arrest of First Vice President Machar and for all party leaders to return to direct dialogue,” a sign that the U.S. is holding firm.
The ongoing negotiations with South Sudan come after a recent Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for eight men to be deported to Juba this month. The court’s decision may have helped the Trump administration turbocharge these deals after blocking a lower-court ruling that required meaningful due process for those the administration wants to send to third countries.
The aim of the Trump administration’s strategy in Africa is two-fold, said Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute. Many African nations have long been reluctant to take migrant deportees, so in some cases, the administration’s efforts are designed to target those countries. But the deportations also play into the Trump White House’s larger strategy of deterring immigrants from illegally crossing into the United States.
“This is a small number of people, when you really think about it,” he said. “But they get the attention, and part of it is to get the attention.”
