Is Liberia an American dumping ground — or a place where a new generation of arrivals can build a new life?

That’s the question Liberians are asking themselves after the first people to be deported to the West African country from the United States arrived in the capital, Monrovia.

The 20 people on the flight from Louisiana were the first to be sent under an agreement that could see up to 1,200 people transferred to Liberia, a country of less than 6 million people, many of them descendants of formerly enslaved Black Americans.

Liberian officials said the new arrivals were from “African and western hemisphere countries.”

Liberia is one of several countries that have agreed to take migrants being deported from the US under the Trump administration’s anti-immigration crackdown. The arrivals are coming to a nation whose history is deeply tied to migration from the US.

Nearly two centuries ago, free and formerly enslaved Black Americans crossed the Atlantic to settle in what would become Liberia – a name that translates as “land of the free.”

Now, a country shaped in part by that migration is accepting people the US wants to remove.

For Liberians, that has thrown up a mix of feelings in a country still recovering from a long and bloody civil war.

“This country is going through a lot, and having more people come in — can we handle all of this?” said Pheta Morris, 48, a descendant of the Black Americans who settled in Liberia.

But she said she sees the new arrivals through the lens of Liberia’s history and is struck by the contrast.

“I think about the Americo-Liberians — people who were rejected where they were and needed somewhere to go, and Liberia opened its arms to them,” she said.