President Donald Trump's administration quietly agreed to arm a foreign military unit with a gruesome human rights record, a new report revealed.
The Trump administration agreed to send about $35 million in military aid, including armored personnel carriers, to Cameroon's Rapid Intervention Battalion, known as the BIR, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. U.S. officials and congressional aides told The Journal that State Department officials negotiated the aid alongside a deal for the Central African nation to accept deportees from the U.S. who aren't Cameroonian.
The unit has a brutal past. A 2017 Amnesty International report accused the BIR of war crimes during its fight against the Boko Haram terrorist group, finding that members beat and drowned detainees and tortured some of them to death. Trump's first administration cut off some aid to the unit in 2019 and booted Cameroon from a U.S.-Africa trade pact over its forces' ongoing abuses, which Cameroon denied at the time.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, placed a hold on the aid package earlier this year, according to The Journal. That stalled the deal for months until April, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio's team told her the administration was overriding her and pushing ahead.
Shaheen this week tore into the arrangement as "grotesque" and said Rubio had let her down by signing off on it.
In a statement, Shaheen argued that the U.S. has no business handing sensitive military gear to governments with shaky human rights records, let alone as payment for taking in people.
Cameroon started accepting U.S. deportation flights in December and has taken in at least 36 people since, according to Refugees International, a humanitarian advocacy group. Some officials told The Journal the Trump administration intends to ramp up flights to African countries in the coming months. Around the time the aid was disclosed to Congress in January, the U.S. also steered $30 million to the United Nations refugee agency's operations in Cameroon, even as it slashed foreign aid elsewhere.
The State Department wouldn't discuss the details of any agreement but praised its partnership with Cameroon on security and counterterrorism, and said it follows the Leahy Law, which prohibits military aid to forces tied to human rights abuses. Cameroon's embassy in Washington did not respond to The Journal's request for comment.