Construction of the 50 bed quarantine center for asymptomatic US citizens is underway in a Kenyan town that has never recorded a case of Ebola, even as police have killed protesters and a Kenyan court order to stop the work sits unenforced.
In 2014, Donald Trump called President Barack Obama "reckless" for evacuating American Ebola patients to Atlanta. A decade later, his own administration is racing to build a 50-bed quarantine facility in Nanyuki, Kenya, a town that has never recorded a single case of Ebola, while Kenyan police have fired on protesters and a Kenyan court order to halt construction sits on the record, unanswered.
The facility, under construction at Laikipia Air Base, is intended only for US citizens who were exposed to the virus but show no symptoms, according to a Wall Street Journal exclusive. Symptomatic Americans would be evacuated to third countries. Roughly 30 US Public Health Service officers, after a three-week training course, are being deployed to staff the site. The plan was first disclosed not to Kenya, but to American media by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a cabinet meeting, where he said the United States "cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter" the country. A State Department spokesperson later confirmed $13.5 million for Kenya preparedness and $112 million for the regional response.
Kenya has no Ebola. The current outbreak, declared an international public health emergency by the World Health Organization on 17 May 2026, is driven by a rare Bundibugyo strain circulating in the Democratic Republic of Congo and spreading into Uganda. As of early June, the Al Jazeera explainer put the toll at roughly 321 infections and 48 deaths in the DRC, with one death and nine confirmed cases in Uganda. The Bundibugyo strain has no approved vaccine. Only the more common Zaire strain does.
Nanyuki learned of the US plan the way the rest of the world did: through Rubio's US remarks in May. On 29 May the Kenyan High Court suspended construction after a challenge from the Katiba Institute and the Kenya Law Society, Al Jazeera reported. The court extended that suspension on 2 June. US military cargo flights, tracked on flight-monitoring services and confirmed by diplomatic sources, have continued to land at Laikipia Air Base since. Satellite imagery reviewed by Reuters, and cited in subsequent reporting, shows white tents filling roughly 11 acres inside the base since 27 May.
On 1 and 2 June protests in Nanyuki turned violent. At least two people were killed and one injured on the first day. On 9 June police used water cannon and tear gas against demonstrators marching on the base, according to Al Jazeera correspondent Malcolm Webb reporting from Nanyuki. The Kenyan NGO Vocal Africa posted footage to X showing one person shot in the head and killed. The Kenyan government has not, as of writing, confirmed the 9 June fatality.
President William Ruto has publicly defended the arrangement. "It would be most unfortunate if on one request by the Americans to set up a facility at their cost, we would refuse, we would look very inhuman," he said. Health Minister Aden Bare Duale has gone further, posting that the facility will serve Kenyans as well as Americans, a claim the United States has not confirmed. The US framing, in the WSJ scoop and the Al Jazeera explainer, holds that the facility is exclusively for US citizens.
The organized Kenyan medical profession is not reassured. The Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union put it bluntly: "If it is too dangerous for America, it is too dangerous for Kenya." Trade unionist and physician Bill Muriuki noted that the terms of the deal have never been published, and that Kenyans first heard of it from Rubio's US remarks. The same complaint runs through the Nanyuki protests: a foreign government made a decision about a local airstrip, announced it to its own press, and waited for the courts to intervene.
The asymmetry sits inside a larger US retreat from regional health spending. USAID was effectively shuttered early in the second Trump term, and most US foreign health aid was cut. ProPublica and other analysts have described downstream effects in Kenya as a man-made hunger crisis. Kenya has signed a series of bilateral deals exchanging health data and access to critical minerals for continued, reduced US funding. The Nanyuki facility sits inside that frame: a US pandemic posture that has pulled back from multilateral aid while building a parallel, extraterritorial safety net for its own citizens.
What to watch next: the Kenyan court's next hearing on the suspension, the pace of US military flights into Laikipia, and any joint statement from Nairobi and Washington on who, exactly, the facility will treat. As of 14 June 2026, none of those answers are on the public record.