DR Congo makes deal with U.S. to take in deported foreigners

Migrant couple sit with their belongings inside the Portland Exposition Building in Portland, Maine. Maine's largest city has repurposed the basketball arena as an emergency shelter in anticipation of hundreds of asylum seekers who are headed to the state from the U.S. southern border. Most are arriving from Congo and Angola. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

KINSHASA, DR CONGO - The Democratic Republic of Congo has said it will take in foreigners deported from the United States under a deal with Washington, which also wants access to Congolese mineral wealth.

Contacted by AFP on Tuesday, the government did not say how many third-country nationals would be accepted under the agreement nor what the U.S. had offered the Kinshasa government in return for participating in its mass deportation campaign.

Several other African countries have, in recent months, made deals with the U.S. to take in deportees -- Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda and South Sudan.

A number of the deals include U.S. financial or logistical assistance.

Many of the people rounded up for deportation have U.S. work permits and no criminal record, according to U.S. statistics.

Human Rights Watch said in September the “opaque deals” were “part of a U.S. policy approach that violated international human rights law and is designed to instrumentalise human suffering as a deterrent to migration”.

The NGO said recent expulsions of people to African countries had “exposed several hundred people to a risk of arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and refoulement.”

Refoulement refers to the practice of forcibly sending refugees or asylum seekers to a country where they are liable to suffer persecution.

On Sunday, the DRC government announced it would “temporarily take in third country nationals” from the U.S. starting this month.

The huge central African country is one of the poorest in the world and nearly three quarters of the population live under the poverty threshold, according to World Bank figures.

The DRC communications ministry said the deportees would be taken to Kinshasa, whose infrastructure is insufficient for the needs of the 17 million people living in the capital.

Most homes lack access to running water or electricity.

The government said it had made arrangements for “reception facilities.”

The ministry said there would be no cost to the Congolese government because “the logistical and technical aspects of the operation will be handled by the US government.”

UN human rights experts complained in July that the Trump administration’s “expedited removal procedure could allow people to be taken to a country other than their own in as little as a single day, without an immigration court hearing or other appearance before a judge.”

Kinshasa and Washington are also negotiating U.S. access to DRC health data and mineral assets.

The two governments signed a $1.2-billion health partnership in February allowing the U.S. to gather data on epidemics.

In December, the DRC signed an agreement granting Washington access to its vast mineral reserves.

The plan gives Washington access to copper, cobalt, coltan and lithium, at a time of intensifying global competition among major powers for such critical resources.

In return, the U.S. has mediated negotiations between the DRC and neighbouring Rwanda designed to stabilise the conflict-plagued eastern DRC, where much of the mineral wealth is concentrated.

The negotiations have not, as yet, led to a halt in the fighting that has beset the eastern DRC for the past three decades.