Deportation to a human rights wasteland? Uganda is not so unlike Trump’s America
Trump regime threatens to deport Abrego Garcia to a nation of arbitrary detentions, corruption
Five months after U.S. officials’ “administrative error” led to the wrongful deportation of immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador for nearly three months of confinement at that nation’s CECOT anti-terrorism prison, the Trump regime today arrested him again and now threatens to deport him to another human rights wasteland — Uganda.
Uganda’s human rights is notorious for much more than its anti-homosexuality law of 2023, which threatens the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”. That law isn’t likely to pose problems for Abrego Garcia, who has a wife and family, but Uganda’s human rights abusers target almost everyone living there.
Many of those abuses were recorded in the U.S. Department of State’s 2023 human rights report on Uganda, which now is uncomfortable to read in the United States, because it includes some injustices that are now practiced both in Uganda and the U.S.
The State Department’s list of significant human rights issues in Uganda included credible reports of:
- Enforced disappearance[s];
- Arbitrary arrest or detention;
- Serious government corruption;
- Serious problems with the independence of the judiciary;
- Inability of citizens to determine their government peacefully through free and fair elections;
- Serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation;
- Harsh and life-threatening prison conditions;
- Serious government restrictions on or harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations;
- Serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including violence or threats of violence against journalists, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists, and censorship;
- Arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings;
- Torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government;
- Political prisoners or detainees;
- Arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy;
- Serious restrictions on internet freedom;
- Substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws on the organization, funding, or operation of nongovernmental and civil society organizations;
- Extensive gender-based violence, including domestic or intimate partner violence, sexual violence, workplace violence, child, early, and forced marriage, female genital mutilation/cutting, and other forms of such violence;
- Laws criminalizing consensual same-sex sexual conduct between adults, which were enforced; and crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons.
Abrego Garcia is faced with with a “Sophie’s Choice” between two intolerable alternatives, says human rights activist Melanie Nathan, executive director the the African Human Rights Coalition:
“Now, instead of receiving restitution or acknowledgment of this mistake, Abrego Garcia is presented with a cruel ultimatum: plead guilty to human trafficking charges—widely believed to be fabricated—and be deported to Costa Rica, or refuse and be sent to Uganda. He has no ties to Uganda: no cultural, familial, linguistic, or national connection. Deportation there would amount to a social death sentence
“This is not just bureaucratic indifference—it is institutional cruelty. …
“The administration is fully aware of [human rights abuses in Uganda], yet Uganda has been selected as a destination for a man already traumatized by a wrongful deportation and imprisonment.
“Rather than correcting the error, the Trump administration appears to be doubling down—punishing truth, compounding trauma, and disregarding basic human dignity.”
