KINGSTON, Jamaica — Jamaica is in active negotiations with the United States to accept migrants who were deported from countries other than Jamaica, making the island nation the latest in a string of Caribbean nations aligning with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.
Jamaica’s National Security Minister Dr. Horace Chang confirmed on Tuesday that the country has already signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Under the agreement, Jamaica would receive as many as 25 individuals from non-Jamaican nations every two weeks.
Chang indicated that the incoming deportees would not be placed in detention facilities, though the specifics of their housing arrangements have not yet been determined. Negotiations over financial compensation for accepting the migrants are also still ongoing.
Should the agreement be fully finalized, Jamaica would join Mexico, El Salvador, Uganda, and several other countries that have already agreed to take in third-country migrants removed from the United States.
The proposal has already drawn strong opposition from the People’s National Party, known as the PNP, which accused the Jamaican government of conducting the negotiations behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny.
The PNP argued that taking in these migrants puts Jamaica’s domestic security, international reputation, and already-strained social infrastructure at serious risk.
Opposition spokesperson Donna Scott Mottley issued a statement saying, “Jamaicans deserve to know whether discussions have taken place and whether any commitments or understandings have been reached.”
Minister Chang pushed back on those concerns, drawing a clear distinction between accepting Jamaican citizens back home and processing foreign nationals through the country. “Jamaica, like other sovereign nations, is obligated under international laws to accept the return of its own citizens,” he said. “However, this new arrangement does not mean third-country nationals are being dumped on our shores. This is a structured, managed process to transit individuals through Jamaica to their final destination.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
As part of its broader immigration enforcement push, the Trump administration has used a series of largely secretive agreements to deport more than 19,000 people to third countries, according to the organization Third Country Deportation Watch. Some of those individuals have ended up in nations they had never even heard of before.
The majority of deportees have been sent to Mexico, but more than 1,500 others have been distributed across more than 20 additional countries — many of them lower-income nations in Latin America and Africa that are seeking to maintain good standing with Washington.
The debate unfolding in Jamaica reflects a wider divide across the Caribbean, where multiple governments have quietly entered into various arrangements with the U.S. in order to avoid damaging travel restrictions or economic consequences.
The Dominican Republic signed a non-binding agreement to temporarily house a limited number of non-criminal third-country nationals, while specifically excluding unaccompanied minors and nationals from neighboring Haiti — a deal that also faced heavy criticism.
Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit called a similar deal a “pragmatic step” to protect important ties with Washington, though he noted that violent offenders would not be accepted.
Antigua and Barbuda took a more cautious approach, with Prime Minister Gaston Browne confirming a framework that caps total acceptances at no more than 10 non-criminal individuals, evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Guyana, meanwhile, is using the negotiations to address a massive labor shortage driven by its oil boom, exploring a U.S.-funded framework to bring in skilled, non-criminal migrants to help fill an estimated gap of 80,000 workers.
Human rights advocates point to the case of Orville Etoria as a stark example of the dangers these third-country deportation agreements can pose. Etoria, a Jamaican citizen who arrived in the United States as a child in 1976 and lived there for nearly 50 years, had his green card revoked after a criminal conviction. Rather than being sent back to Jamaica, he was deported to Eswatini in July 2025.
Upon arriving in Eswatini, Etoria and four other third-country nationals were stripped of due process rights and held indefinitely at the Matsapha Correctional Complex, a maximum-security prison. After two months of sustained diplomatic pressure from the Jamaican government, Etoria was finally returned to Jamaica.
A U.S. federal district court ultimately ruled the third-country removal policy unlawful in February 2026, finding that the U.S. cannot send migrants to undesignated countries without proper notice. However, the policy continues to be enforced while the case moves through the appeals process.
