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

The Supreme Court's September 29 ruling lets the administration resume deporting migrants to third countries, including Liberia, while litigation continues. At least 20 deportees, most with no connection to Liberia, have already been flown there as part of a program paying 35 nations to take in people removed from the U.S. One Colombian deportee told PBS he had never heard of the country before landing there.

The arrangement echoes the American Colonization Society's 19th-century campaign to relocate free Black Americans to what became Liberia, a project backed by slaveholding politicians who saw free Black communities as a threat to the institution of slavery. Roughly 16,000 Black Americans made that earlier journey, many unwillingly, and at least 20% died of malaria. Frederick Douglass opposed the colonization scheme as a dodge from securing rights at home.

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