First U.S. Third-Country Deportees Arrive In Jamaica

By News Americas Now News Editor

News Americas Now, NY, NY, Thurs. Oct. 14, 2026: The first group of migrants arrived in Jamaica Tuesday under a U.S. deportation agreement that some Jamaican lawmakers say they still haven’t been allowed to read in full – four months after it was signed.

Twenty-two adults, including seven women, landed at Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport Tuesday afternoon and were bused under police escort to an undisclosed location, the first arrivals under a bilateral memorandum of understanding signed in June that makes Jamaica a transit point for “third-country nationals” the U.S. is deporting – migrants who are not Jamaican and not being sent directly to their home countries. Jamaica joins a growing list of nations, including Guyana, St. Kitts & Nevis, Liberia, Eswatini, and Paraguay, absorbing deportees under similar Trump administration arrangements whose legality the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to settle.

An Avelo flight takes off from Tweed New Haven Airport as advocates gather outside to protest the airlines’ contract to transport deportees on behalf of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
(Tyler Russell/Connecticut Public via Getty Images)

What’s drawing the sharpest criticism in Kingston isn’t the arrivals themselves – it’s that the government negotiated and signed the deal without ever tabling it in Parliament. “Jamaicans are being asked to trust a secret document that touches their security, their communities and their public services,” said Fitz Jackson, the opposition’s national security spokesperson, who has called the failure to table the executed MOU a “blatant contempt to the people of Jamaica.” Opposition Leader Mark Golding has repeatedly pressed the government to say what Jamaica actually gets out of the arrangement.

The government’s defense has been procedural reassurance rather than disclosure. The Ministries of National Security and Foreign Affairs say the program is capped at 25 people every two weeks, that Jamaica isn’t funding it, that no migrant with a criminal record will be allowed through, and that the International Organization for Migration – not Jamaica – is responsible for housing and logistics under its Assisted Voluntary Return program. Foreign Affairs Minister Kamina Johnson Smith said this week there is “nothing prejudicial” in the agreement, but confirmed the U.S. has not agreed to make the document public.

That gap – between what officials say is in the deal and the public’s inability to verify it – has fed months of unease. In June, the government had to publicly deny rumors that migrants would be housed in the rural parish of St. Mary. Bishop Alvin Bailey, head of a local evangelical alliance, has questioned why the U.S. couldn’t simply deport people directly to their home countries instead of routing them through Jamaica. “We just don’t trust what the government is saying,” he said.

With arrivals now underway and set to continue every two weeks, the core question Jamaican lawmakers have been asking since June remains unanswered: what, exactly, did Jamaica agree to?

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