CARICOM | Transit or Tribute? CARICOM’s Careful Words Cannot Mask a Region Squeezed into Washington’s Deportation Machine

After months of country-by-country pressure, visa bonds and quiet signings, the Conference of Heads of Government has finally spoken on Third Country Nationals — in four paragraphs of diplomatic language the region’s citizens are unlikely to swallow.

The Caribbean Community has finally spoken on the most contentious question confronting the region this year — and it took a closed-door caucus of Heads of Government to produce four paragraphs of the most carefully lawyered language to emerge from the Secretariat in recent memory.

In a statement issued Thursday from Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, CARICOM leaders confirmed what the region’s citizens have suspected for months: the Memoranda of Understanding on Third Country Nationals (TCNs), pressed upon individual member states by the government of the United States, are now an accomplished fact of Caribbean life.

Some countries had already signed, the statement noted, while others remain in discussions. Thirty countries globally, the leaders were at pains to add, have done the same.

The subtext is unmistakable: everybody else is doing it. The people of the region remain unpersuaded.

From Basseterre to Kingston, Castries to Roseau, the reaction to these agreements — and to the public utterances of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who boasted in May that Washington had secured deportation deals with 20 nations he improbably described as “safe countries” — has been visceral.

Caribbean citizens have said, loudly and repeatedly, that they have no intention of becoming a dumping ground for the human beings the United States wishes to discard.

The anatomy of a squeeze

The Heads’ statement leans heavily on the distinction between transit and settlement, insisting the MOUs provide for the passage of individuals “without criminal antecedents” to their home countries rather than their resettlement in member states, and urging that every effort be made to help citizens grasp the difference.

Citizens grasp it perfectly well. What they also grasp is how these signatures were extracted.

Dominica and Antigua and Barbuda were hit with US visa restrictions effective January 1; within three weeks their citizens faced travel bonds of US$5,000 to US$15,000 merely to apply for a visa. Both signed. Grenada, which had resisted Washington’s push to host a military-grade radar installation, subsequently found its own citizens added to the visa-bond list — and duly declared itself prepared to sign. St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia and Belize concluded agreements in January.

Jamaica followed in June, agreeing to accept up to 25 non-nationals every fortnight — the largest publicly known allotment in the region.

Former St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves warned months ago that Caribbean states were being “picked off one by one”. The current Vincentian leader, Dr Godwin Friday, put it more plaintively to his OECS colleagues: “What may be mere tremors for large nations are experienced as earthquakes by us.”

If these individuals could simply be returned to their home countries, why does Washington need Caribbean intermediaries at all?

Transit to where, exactly?

The assurance that TCNs are merely in transit invites an obvious question: if these individuals could simply be returned to their home countries, why does Washington need Caribbean intermediaries at all? The answer lies in cases like that of Orville Etoria, the Jamaican deported by the United States not to Jamaica but to Eswatini, where he was held in a maximum-security prison until sustained diplomatic pressure secured his repatriation.

Third-country deportation exists precisely because direct return is blocked — legally, diplomatically or practically. Transit, in such circumstances, can shade quickly into indefinite limbo.

And the transfers are no longer hypothetical. In May, St Kitts and Nevis quietly received the region’s first arrivals: three CARICOM nationals transferred from US custody.

Nor should the treatment of the region’s most vulnerable member escape notice. Haitian nationals have been explicitly excluded from several of these arrangements — an awkward posture for a Community that claims to lead the international conversation on Haiti’s future while barring Haitians from its own gates.

Sovereignty on layaway

To be fair, the statement is not without substance. Leaders affirmed their commitment to the dignity of migrants, pledged that TCN arrangements would neither compromise regional security nor divert resources and services from citizens, and promised genuine engagement with the public.

Signatory governments insist they retain absolute case-by-case discretion, and that Washington bears the costs. These are not trivial safeguards, and honest observers should acknowledge them.

But dignity is precisely what is at stake — including the dignity of small sovereign states negotiating with a superpower wielding visa bonds, tariff threats and radar installations. The Heads promise that these arrangements will serve the region’s interests.

The citizens, who were never consulted before the ink dried, will be watching to see whether that promise is worth more than the paper on which Thursday’s statement was printed.

WiredJA