Sierra Leone has become the latest African country to receive migrants deported from the United States as Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration expands across the continent. A plane carrying nine West African migrants landed at the country’s international airport, just outside Freetown, on Wednesday morning.

The witnessed the group arrive on a Boeing charter flight and be escorted from Freetown International Airport in a white van. The deportees were seven men and two women, and included five people from Ghana, two from Guinea, one from Nigeria and one from Senegal.

Foreign Minister Timothy Musa Kabba said last week that Sierra Leone had agreed to accept up to 300 people a year expelled by the United States. He said the new arrivals must originally come from Ecowas member states, West Africa’s regional bloc. Like Sierra Leone, Ghana has said it would only accept deportees from Ecowas countries.

The arrangement places Sierra Leone in a widening group of African states taking in people sent from the US to third countries, alongside the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana and South Sudan. It also raises a practical question that has not been answered publicly: what happens to people whose own nationalities do not match the country that took them in, and who may already have spent years building ties elsewhere in West Africa.

Kenvah Solutions told the that the migrants would only be allowed to stay at its facilities for two weeks before being sent to their home countries. That timetable sits inside Ecowas rules that let citizens of one member state stay in another for up to 90 days, but it remains unclear how that will work for people who were deported by the US into a country that is not theirs.

The transfers are part of a broader US practice of sending migrants to third countries under Trump’s immigration crackdown. A minority report from the US Senate’s committee on foreign relations said the administration had likely spent more than $40m on third-country deportations up to January last year. Critics say the policy breaches international human rights standards and puts vulnerable migrants at risk.

For Sierra Leone, the first visible arrivals make the new deal concrete. The promise now has faces, nationalities and a deadline, and the next test is whether the country can move people out again as quickly as it has agreed to take them in.