When Liberia announced late last month that it would temporarily host Salvadoran national Kilmar Armando Abrego García on “humanitarian grounds” if he were deported by the Trump administration for a second time, the West African country was broadcasting its unique history as a haven for Black migrants fleeing racism and economic servitude in the United States.According to the Liberian government, the decision to welcome Abrego García, who was unlawfully deported from the United States in March only to return under a court injunction in June, follows its “longstanding tradition of offering refuge to those in need”.Liberia was once a semi-autonomous territory funded in part by the Washington, DC-based American Colonisation Society (ACS) comprising powerful white men who viewed free Blacks as a threat to slavery and saw emigration (deportation) as the only solution to dispose of them. Its founders – repatriates from the US and Caribbean who joined recaptives (Africans rescued aboard illegal slave ships) from the Congo River basin – rebuffed ACS largesse and declared the country independent in 1847.The free and formerly enslaved Blacks who founded Liberia were not unlike Abrego García, who has become an international symbol of the dangers of presidential overreach. They, too, were pawns in white …
