The Caribbean is demanding that the world confront one of history’s greatest crimes: the forced transportation of millions of African men, women, and children across borders and oceans against their will. They were stolen from their homes, separated from their families, deprived of freedom, and taken into a system designed by powerful nations to exploit their bodies, labor, and lives.
In March, every Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member state supported a United Nations resolution recognizing the transatlantic trafficking and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as humanity’s gravest crime because of its scale, duration, brutality, and continuing consequences. In July, CARICOM leaders approved a revised Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice and reaffirmed the region’s demand that European nations account for slavery, colonialism, and Indigenous genocide.
Yet in 2026, some of those same Caribbean governments are quietly entering arrangements that could make the region part of Donald Trump’s forced-deportation network. According to Third Country Deportation Watch, a project tracking U.S. agreements and transfers, the Trump administration has entered into arrangements with Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, the Dominican Republic, Dominica, Guyana, Jamaica, and St. Lucia, although transfers under several of those agreements have not yet been publicly documented. The organization said the terms of some Caribbean arrangements remain undisclosed or cannot yet be fully categorized.
St. Kitts and Nevis has already gone farther: The tracker reports that the federation received three third-country deportees from the United States in May — nationals of Jamaica and Belize — under a memorandum of understanding signed with Washington.
The disclosed agreement reportedly permits the transfer of CARICOM nationals, excluding certain people with violent or sexual-offense backgrounds, while leaving annual limits and U.S. assistance for housing, food, and other support to later operational arrangements.
This is not chattel slavery, and it would be historically irresponsible to pretend that the two systems are equivalent. African enslavement was a centuries-long system of racial ownership, hereditary bondage, forced labor, and mass human exploitation, but the moral contradiction before the Caribbean cannot be ignored. How can regional leaders demand accountability for the forced transportation and dehumanization of our ancestors while signing agreements that allow another powerful nation to forcibly transport unwanted people to countries where they may have no citizenship, family, community, or meaningful connection?
Reparatory justice cannot merely be a claim on the past. It must also be a moral discipline in the present.
Third-country deportation involves removing people from the United States, not to their nation of citizenship, but to another country willing to receive them. Some have lived in the United States for years. Some are asylum seekers whose claims have not been fully heard. Others have received legal protection because returning them to their homelands could expose them to persecution or torture.
Third Country Deportation Watch reports that, as of May 5, the Trump administration had sent more than 21,000 third-country nationals to at least 24 countries. More than 18,000 were sent to Mexico, while smaller numbers were transferred to countries including Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Eswatini, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Rwanda, South Sudan, Uganda, and St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean.
The organization said these transfers have separated parents from children and spouses from one another; cut people off from their U.S. communities; and, in some cases, exposed them to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and “chain refoulement” — the risk that they will eventually be returned to a country where they face persecution or torture.
The organization also estimates that more than 30,000 asylum cases have been denied consideration on their merits under so-called Asylum Cooperative Agreements, leaving people facing removal to third countries without first receiving a full hearing about the dangers they say they fled.
The Trump administration is not concealing the purpose of its broader immigration agenda: It has repeatedly portrayed migrants and asylum seekers as threats, used detention and distant deportation as instruments of fear, and encouraged immigrants to abandon legal claims and leave the United States voluntarily.
However, Donald Trump’s xenophobia is not the only issue here. The harder question is why Caribbean governments are agreeing to assist him. What exactly have Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica, Belize, and St. Lucia signed?
- Who can be transferred?
- Will those people be detained upon arrival?
- Will they be permitted to seek asylum?
- Will they have access to lawyers, interpreters, medical care, and their families?
- How long will they remain?
- Can they be sent onward to nations where they face persecution?
- How much is the United States paying?
- Were aid, visas, trade concessions, deportation relief, or diplomatic favors part of the discussion?
- Why have Caribbean citizens and parliaments not been allowed to see and debate the full terms of these arrangements?
Third Country Deportation Watch estimates that the United States has already paid at least $44 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars directly to governments under third-country agreements, excluding the costs of removal flights. The group said some arrangements have emerged amid threats involving visa restrictions, tariffs, deportation of participating countries’ own nationals, and other forms of pressure or inducement.
Small Caribbean states often operate in unequal relationships with Washington. Governments may fear visa sanctions, trade retaliation, or the accelerated return of their own deported nationals. They may also be offered badly needed financial support.
However, vulnerability does not eliminate responsibility. Caribbean governments have spent generations arguing that powerful states cannot use economic or political dominance to escape moral accountability. They cannot now claim that the region is too small or dependent to question what it is being asked to do.
Nor can reparations become a ceremonial cause invoked at CARICOM conferences while present-day human beings are treated as diplomatic cargo. CARICOM’s Ten-Point Plan calls for Europe to acknowledge that Africans were stolen from their homes and forcibly transported to the Caribbean. It insists that historical wrongdoing carries present-day obligations and that human beings cannot be reduced to property, labor, or instruments of state policy.
Those principles should not disappear when the people being forcibly moved are African, Asian, Latin American, or Middle Eastern migrants rather than our own ancestors. The Caribbean cannot demand reparatory justice with one hand while quietly facilitating forced displacement with the other.
Our history does not give us permission to look away. It gives us a special obligation to look more closely, because the true measure of reparatory justice is not only whether we remember the people transported against their will centuries ago. It is whether we recognize the humanity of those being transported against their will today.
Felicia J. Persaud is the founder and publisher of NewsAmericasNow.com, the only daily syndicated newswire and digital platform dedicated exclusively to Caribbean Diaspora and Black immigrant news across the Americas.
