Plane with first migrants expelled from U.S. lands in Sierra Leone: AFP

In this January 30 photo, migrants are deported using a US military plane in El Paso, Texas. (File -Christian Torres/Anadolu/Getty Images)

A first plane carrying west African migrants expelled from the United States under U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown arrived in Sierra Leone on Wednesday, an AFP journalist saw.

The impoverished west African country is the latest African nation to accept expelled migrants from the United States in recent months, under a Trump administration drive fiercely criticized by rights groups.

Twenty-five migrants from west African countries were on board, according to Sierra Leone’s foreign minister.

Police, medics, government officials and members of the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) were on hand to receive them at the international airport just outside Freetown.

The authorities in Freetown have agreed to accept up to 300 people a year expelled by the United States -- but only from the member states of the west African economic bloc ECOWAS.

“We are taking in these deported people because they are from west Africa, and some of them hold Sierra Leonean residence permits obtained many years ago,” Foreign Minister Timothy Musa Kabba told AFP by telephone late Tuesday.

They “have the right to stay in the country for 90 days and can then return to their country of origin,” Kabba told AFP.

The United States is providing US$1.5 million to support the program “to cover the humanitarian and operational costs linked to this agreement,” according to a foreign ministry document consulted by AFP.

Sierra Leone is just the latest African country to have taken in people deported from the United States, following Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda and South Sudan.

In return, Washington provides financial and logistical support.

Some countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, have taken in migrants from other continents, including Latin America.

Human Rights Watch, urging African nations to reject the arrangements, argued in September that the “opaque deals” were “part of a U.S. policy approach that violated international human rights law.”