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The Trump administration has agreed to send around $35 million in military aid to Cameroon's Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR), The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, as part of a wider arrangement under which Cameroon accepts migrants deported from the United States who are not Cameroonian citizens. The Journal, citing U.S. officials and congressional aides involved in or briefed on the negotiations, reported that the military aid and the deportation arrangement were brokered simultaneously by State Department officials as part of the same package.
The BIR is Cameroon's elite counterterrorism unit. Amnesty International documented in its 2017 report 'Cameroon's Secret Torture Chambers' that Cameroonian security forces, including at the BIR's Salak headquarters, held people incommunicado and subjected them to beatings, drowning and other torture between 2013 and 2017, in the fight against Boko Haram. The United States cut some military aid to Cameroon during President Donald Trump's first term over human rights concerns, after videos verified by Amnesty International showed Cameroonian forces killing civilians.
Cameroon agreed in December 2025 to accept third-country nationals deported from the United States, and 53 people were sent there between January 14 and October 12, 2026, according to the Third Country Deportation Watch tracker. Human Rights Watch, in its October 8 report 'To Scare People,' documented that people expelled to African countries that were not their own, including Cameroon, were arbitrarily detained and in some cases sent onward to countries where they faced persecution or torture.
The Cameroon arrangement sits within a wider set of third-country deportation deals. The United States had already pledged nearly $400 million in health assistance to Cameroon over five years and $30 million for the United Nations refugee agency's work there, and the Journal's reporting shows military assistance is now also being tied to a government's willingness to accept deportees. The Journal did not report any admission of a quid pro quo by the administration.