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Uganda has become a testing ground for political experimentation by white Christian nationalists in the United States and their allies in government.
The Trump administration’s ongoing effort to rendition formerly imprisoned immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda — which he has no connection to and where prisoners are known to face abuse — highlights the role it is poised to play as a receptacle for immigrants the Trump administration wants discarded or expelled, like trash or toxins, from the United States.
In his first term, Trump notoriously referred to African nations as “shithole countries.” Now, in his second term, he wants to deport immigrants from the U.S. to Uganda, which is controlled by Trump-loving dictator Yoweri Museveni, and the arrangement to accept such deportees has been met with criticism from Museveni’s opponents, who say he is relying on an alliance with Trump to maintain power.
And this wouldn’t be the first time Museveni has leaned on American conservatives for assistance. As writer Charlotte Clymer noted in a recent post on X, Museveni has spent decades building inroads with American evangelicals, who have used Uganda as a petri dish for an extremist Christian agenda.
She wrote:
For a few decades, Uganda has basically been a movement laboratory for American evangelicals. They’ve poured a massive fortune into the country and directly influenced its politics in a socially conservative direction. President Yoweri Museveni has a long relationship with American evangelicals. It’s entirely unsurprising the Trump administration is now leveraging that relationship for its fascist agenda.
White American evangelicals’ use of Uganda to push a violent, Christian nationalist agenda, including the persecution of LGBTQ people, is the subject of director Roger Ross Williams’ 2013 documentary “God Loves Uganda.” And MSNBC contributor Nayyera Haq wrote back in 2023 about American evangelicals’ support for a law in Uganda that imposes the death penalty for homosexual acts and has helped turn the nation into the hub of catastrophic human rights abuses it is today.
It’s also worth watching MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s discussion of that law, also from 2023, with Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time. (Check it out in the clip at the top of this page.) It underscores a truth that has become abundantly clear under the Trump administration: that Uganda, in some ways, embodies the worst aspects of U.S. colonial power in the African continent, as a place to which the U.S. exports some of its most heinous and discriminatory ideas.