Liberia has agreed to receive up to 1,200 third-country deportees from the United States within a year, Liberian authorities said, in one of the largest such arrangements under the Trump administration's migration policy.

Information Minister Jerolinmek Piah said the first group of 20 people was expected on Thursday. He said the group would include Africans as well as nationals from North America, South America and the Caribbean.

Liberia's justice minister, Natu Oswald Tweh, said the government had screened the list of migrants ahead of arrival. Piah said people sent to Liberia could seek asylum there or leave the country, and that the United States would support management of the programme and Liberia's migration system.

Transparency and safeguards remain the open questions. The public does not yet know the protection needs of individual deportees, the legal terms of the arrangement or how access to asylum and independent legal advice will work in practice.