Transit to Nowhere: The Two Questions Jamaica's Deportee Deal Has Not

Answered

Minister Chang says this is about transit, not settlement. But the only fully operational version of this exact program anywhere in the world shows that transit is the part most likely to fail, and nobody in Kingston has said what happens when it does.

By Janiel McEwan, Economist and Researcher

Part II

Part I of this analysis laid out the architecture of Jamaica's Memorandum of Understanding with Washington: the ten-person cap, the per-flight veto, the National Intelligence Bureau clearance requirement, the explicit exclusion of anyone with criminal antecedents. Taken together, it is a more carefully built version of a third-country transfer deal than several other countries managed to negotiate.

But careful architecture only matters if the building does what it says it will do. And there are two questions sitting underneath this entire arrangement that Minister Chang's clarification did not actually answer, questions that go to the foundation of the deal rather than its decoration.

Question One: If These Are Not Jamaicans, and the Goal Is to Send Them Home, Why Route Them Through Jamaica at All?

Chang has been explicit on this point. The people transferred under this MOU would not be settling in Jamaica. They would be facilitated through a structured process to a third territory, which can include return to their own home countries. That is the official justification for the entire arrangement: Jamaica is a waypoint, not a destination.

It is worth asking, plainly, why a waypoint is necessary in the first place. If a person is a citizen of Country X and the United States wants that person returned to Country X, the most direct path is a flight from the United States to Country X. Inserting Jamaica into that journey adds a layer of cost, custody, and diplomatic exposure that a direct flight would not require. So why does it happen at all?

The honest answer, drawn from the US government's own public statements about this program, is that the home countries in question have already refused. When the Department of Homeland Security sent the first five men to Eswatini in July 2025, citizens of Jamaica, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and Yemen, it said explicitly that the men were sent there because their home countries would not take them back. That is the entire premise of third-country transfer: it exists for cases where direct repatriation has already failed.

This is where the official story runs into its own contradiction, documented by the Associated Press at the time. Eswatini's government described the men as being there only in transit, on their way home. The United States government described the same men as people whose home countries had already refused to accept them. Both statements cannot be fully true. If the home countries had genuinely agreed to accept these men eventually, direct repatriation would have worked in the first place and Eswatini would never have entered the picture. The "transit" framing and the "recalcitrant home country" framing are, structurally, opposites.

There is also a deeper, decades-old mechanism behind why this kind of arrangement exists at all, and it has nothing to do with humanitarian transit. Under the US Supreme Court's 2001 ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis, immigration authorities generally cannot detain someone indefinitely once a removal order is final; after a presumptively reasonable period, usually around six months, the government must release the person if there is no significant likelihood of removal in the foreseeable future. Third-country transfer is, functionally, a way around that rule. Rather than release someone domestically because their home country will not take them back, the government instead exports the same unresolved standoff to a country willing to hold that person on its own soil. The destination changes. The underlying diplomatic refusal does not.

And that refusal is rarely new. The United States has maintained a formal "recalcitrant countries" list for decades, identifying nations that routinely refuse or delay accepting their own deported citizens. Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos, three of the five nationalities in that first Eswatini cohort, have appeared on versions of that list across multiple administrations going back to the 1990s and 2000s. China, Iran, and Cambodia have appeared on it too, at various points, alongside countries as varied as Russia, Eritrea, and Myanmar. South Sudan itself, the destination chosen for eight men in the case that opened this entire chapter, had at one point been publicly identified by US officials as recalcitrant on deportations. None of this was a surprise to anyone who follows immigration policy. It was public, documented, and predictable years before Jamaica signed anything.

So when Minister Chang describes this MOU as a transit arrangement that can include return to home countries, the honest follow-up question is: which countries, and on what evidence that they will actually accept the transfer this time, when they would not accept it directly? Nothing about routing a person through Kingston changes Havana's, Hanoi's, or Vientiane's calculation. Jamaica has no diplomatic leverage over those capitals that Washington itself lacks, and Washington's leverage, by definition, already failed in every one of these cases before Jamaica entered the picture.

Question Two: What Happens If the Home Country Refuses to Take Them from Jamaica Too?

This is not a hypothetical. It is the documented, ongoing outcome of the only version of this exact program that has actually been running long enough to produce results.

Since July 2025, Eswatini has received at least nineteen third-country nationals from the United States in three separate batches: five in July, ten in October, and four more in March 2026. As of this writing, only two of those nineteen people have actually been repatriated to their real home countries. The first was Orville Etoria, the Jamaican man whose case opened Part I of this analysis, returned to Jamaica in September 2025 after international pressure and direct advocacy from his legal team. The second, a Cambodian-born US permanent resident named Pheap Rom, was repatriated this past April, roughly nine months after his initial transfer. That leaves somewhere in the order of seventeen people still inside Eswatini's system, some approaching a full year in detention, with no public timeline for when, or whether, the rest will ever complete the journey home that the program was supposedly designed to provide.

The legal fallout from that gap has been substantial. Lawyers and human rights organizations filed a complaint with the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights in December 2025, alleging unlawful and prolonged detention. Eswatini's own Supreme Court ordered limited legal access for some of the men in early 2026, a ruling Amnesty International described as offering only partial relief, since it did not resolve the legal basis for their continued detention or guarantee protection against further unlawful removal. And in February 2026, a US federal court in Massachusetts went further still, ruling that the Department of Homeland Security's underlying third-country removal policy was unlawful, because it failed to give people meaningful notice or a genuine opportunity to argue they would face persecution before being transferred somewhere with no connection to them. That ruling does not undo what has already happened to the nineteen men in Eswatini, but it raises a serious question about how stable the legal foundation of this entire global program actually is, the same foundation Jamaica has now built its own MOU on top of.

This is the part of Minister Chang's account that has no answer yet. The ten-person cap he described is a volume control: it pauses new transfers if more than ten people are pending or remaining in Jamaica at once. What it does not do, at least in anything disclosed publicly so far, is specify a maximum length of time any individual can actually be held while Jamaica and the relevant home country negotiate, argue, or simply fail to communicate about a transfer that may never happen. Eswatini's experience suggests that gap is not a minor technical oversight. It is precisely the space where a "transit" arrangement quietly becomes an open-ended detention arrangement, indistinguishable in practice from the very problem it was designed to solve.

There is a bitter irony in the fact that Jamaica already has direct, personal knowledge of exactly how this failure mode feels, because it happened to one of its own citizens first. Orville Etoria spent more than two months in a maximum-security prison in a country he had never seen, despite Jamaica's stated willingness to take him back the entire time, and he was released only because his case became an international story with lawyers, journalists, and diplomatic pressure behind it. The question Jamaica's government has not answered is what happens to the next person, the one who is not Jamaican, has no consulate fighting for him, and whose home country simply does not respond to Kingston's calls the same way it apparently did not respond to Washington's. Under the framework Chang described, there is no disclosed answer. There is only a cap on how many such people can accumulate at once, and silence on how long any one of them might wait.

What Should Come Before the Next Flight

None of this means cooperation with Washington on this issue is automatically the wrong choice for Jamaica. It means the two most basic questions about the deal, where these people actually go and what happens if nowhere will take them, remain unanswered in everything the government has disclosed so far. Until they are answered, with a public, binding limit on how long any transferred individual can be held in Jamaica and a clear default disposition if a home country never responds, Jamaica is not signing onto a transit agreement. It is signing onto a promise that transit will happen, backed by exactly the same kind of assurance that left seventeen men sitting inside Eswatini's system for the better part of a year. Minister Chang has said Jamaica retains the right to refuse any individual on any flight. He has not yet said what Jamaica will do for the people it has already accepted, on the day the country that is supposed to take them back simply does not answer the phone.