US migrant flights to Liberia evoke troubling history of sending people deemed unwanted to the West African nation

0 October 5, 2026 10:00

In the 1800s, West Africa became a focal point for efforts to remove Black people from America. The arrival of free people later gave the country its name.

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Liberian national police officers stand guard awaiting a plane carrying migrants deported from the United States to land in Harbel, Liberia, on Aug. 20, 2026. Matthew Jacobs / AFP via Getty ImagesThe Supreme Court’s recent decision to temporarily allow the United States to resume deporting migrants to third-country destinations could see the resumption of flights to Liberia.

About the size of Ohio, the West African country is one of 35 countries the Trump administration is paying to shelter and feed Latin Americans and others living in the U.S. without proper legal status. Some of those receiving nations have a reputation for corruption and human rights abuses, and in most cases, those being deported have no links to the host nation.

The policy may ultimately be deemed unconstitutional, but on Sept. 29, 2026, the Supreme Court justices gave the green light for flights to continue while they consider the policy’s legality.

So far, at least 20 U.S. deportees have been flown to Liberia. One Colombian national who arrived in the African nation on Aug. 20 told PBS: “Honestly, I had never heard of Liberia.”

While those being deported to Liberia may not be familiar with the country, the same can’t be said for American policymakers. Unlike the other countries participating in the Trump administration’s efforts, Liberia has a long history with American immigration policy.

As a scholar who has written about that history, I see echoes of past U.S. efforts to move nonwhite people to Liberia in the latest removals. Indeed, it is those past events that gave Liberia its name.

Liberia’s American roots

In the early 1800s, Africa’s west coast attracted American leaders who were looking for a place to send those they viewed as unwanted U.S. residents: free people of African descent.

The region became the endpoint for America’s first massive removal campaign, starting in 1820, focused on relocating Black people “back to Africa.” The chief U.S. organization advocating for this effort was the American Colonization Society, created in 1816.

An American Colonization Society map of Liberia from 1835.
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The initial wave of departures was made up of African American intellectuals, church leaders and merchants. The brutality and inhumanity that white Americans inflicted on free and enslaved Black people drove them out. Many abolitionists and Quakers – who fought to ban slavery – initially supported the colonization society’s removal efforts as a means for helping Black residents escape the cruelty of American laws, especially the Fugitive Slave Acts.

But the true driving force was the slaveholder class, which held a majority in Congress. Those politicians demanded the deportations because they knew the presence of free Black people gave hope to the millions in bondage — who, in some states, outnumbered white people.

These early American settlers named their new home Liberia, for liberty. And by 1847, they fought the colonization society’s control over the land and turned the settlement into the first independent republic in Africa. They set up towns and farms along the coastline, which had local indigenous communities estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

By the end of the century, some 16,000 Black Americans made the journey, many against their will and all on the promise of a better life. Thousands more joined them, some from the Caribbean and at least 6,000 who were rescued from slave-trading vessels, intercepted and sent to Liberia by the U.S. Navy.

A promised land

The colonization society’s mass deportation plan was a nationwide effort with powerful political leaders and slaveholders like Henry Clay, who was a U.S. senator, speaker of the House, secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate; Francis Scott Key, a famous U.S. attorney best known for writing “The Star Spangled Banner”; and Bushrod Washington, a Supreme Court justice and nephew of George Washington.

Ten Southern state legislatures endorsed the idea by passing laws that allowed the freeing of an enslaved person only when deportation out of the state was arranged and paid for. The colonization society raised the funds to pay for their removal to Liberia.

The New York City Colonization Society supported the migration of free Africans Americans to Africa.
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Some abolitionists and future leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, at first supported colonization because they believed it would help accelerate emancipation. But over time, and especially during the Civil War, most instead supported citizen rights for Black residents.

The effort was also opposed by powerful public intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, who helped convince many — including Lincoln — of the need to secure freedom and justice for Black people in a country where they already lived.

At least 20% of those who made the journey to Liberia in the 1800s died of malaria. The rest dealt with supply shortages, severe weather, failed crops and hostility from indigenous communities.

But most white Americans knew none of this. They were told Liberia had fertile soil and a healthy climate; it was a promised land for Black people wishing to go home.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her best-selling novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” furthered this notion by having her main characters, on a hair-raising and violent odyssey to escape enslavement, finally find freedom and peace on a boat headed to Liberia.

Douglass praised her novel in his newspaper, but for this last part of it, which he vehemently opposed. Douglass wrote to Stowe: “We are here, and here we are likely to remain. … We have grown up with this Republic; and I see nothing in our character … which compels the belief that we must leave the United States.”

A lingering US legacy

The American Colonization Society’s strong influence on deportations ended with the Civil War, though the organization continued raising money and influencing U.S. policy until it was dissolved in 1964.

Other independent waves of migration to Liberia followed, especially as the end of Reconstruction unleashed white-led terrorism against Black communities throughout the South. This included the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, a Black-owned business that transported well-off African Americans to Liberia in 1878. Its schooner carried some of Liberia’s soon-to-be-famous families from Charleston, South Carolina, to Liberia’s capital, Monrovia.

African Americans emigrants depart for Liberia on the steamship Laurada from Savannah, Ga., in 1896.
Illustrated American/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

In my view, what they accomplished along West Africa’s windward coast is astounding and, unfortunately, forgotten by most Americans. I’ve collected thousands of records from archives, including the U.S. National Archives, that show how surviving “Americo-Liberians,” as they called themselves, used grit and ingenuity to build large farming operations, grow merchant fleets, establish fisheries and spur other industries in their efforts to be integrated into Western global markets.

Yet for all the successes in difficult circumstances, Liberia in the 20th century remained in America’s shadow. After decades of fending off European attempts to absorb it into their colonial holdings, Liberia sought refuge in its historical relationship with the U.S. And in the 1920s, the two countries began a “special friendship.” At a time when Jim Crow laws ravaged the American South, U.S. business interests created a plantation economy in Liberia rooted in resource extraction that enriched large U.S. companies, including Firestone Tire and Republic Steel.

Archival records show the corruption that grew from deals benefiting the few at the expense of the many that became a long-term driver in the country’s political instability, resulting in civil strife and poverty that has wracked the country for decades.

Coming full circle

For many of the 1,200 people earmarked for deportation to Liberia in the coming months by the U.S. government, landing in the capital, Monrovia, may feel cruel. That it was once a thriving city of Black elites whose forebearers arrived there from America may feel meaningless.

The circumstances of their deportations to Liberia are obviously very different form earlier waves. Those being deported today weren’t captured and sold into bondage; many left home to escape civil war, gang violence or starvation.

But there is a common driver between American policymakers now and those in the 19th century in encouraging and enforcing deportation to Liberia: a desire to rid the U.S. of nonwhite people deemed to represent a problem at home.

In December 2026, the Supreme Court will hear arguments and ultimately decide the constitutionality of this desire, as written into today’s rapid deportation policies.
Karen Masterson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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