The Bahamas archipelago announced Thursday that it had refused a proposal to welcome migrants from other countries expelled by the United States under Donald Trump, who promised to drastically tackle illegal immigration.
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According to NBC News, the president-elect’s team has even compiled a list of countries he would like to see welcome illegal migrants, even if they are not from there: the Bahamas, Panama, Grenada and the Turks Islands. and Caicos, in the Caribbean.
Two of them, Panama and the Turks and Caicos archipelago, expressed the same reluctance as the Bahamas.
“This proposal was presented to the government of the Bahamas, but the Prime Minister studied it and firmly rejected it,” the government of the Bahamas, a British Commonwealth country located a few hundred kilometers from the coast of Florida, said in a statement.
“The Bahamas simply does not have the resources to satisfy such a demand,” insisted the services of the head of government, Philip Davis, of this country of some 400,000 inhabitants.
“Since the Prime Minister’s refusal of this proposal, there have been no further exchanges or discussions with the Donald Trump transition team or any other entity on this subject. The Bahamian government maintains its position.”
The Panamanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said for its part that it had not received a proposal in this regard, but stressed in a press release that it “has no obligation, under international law, to welcome expellees of non-nationality Panamanian.
“The unilateral imposition of deportation policies to third countries, such as those apparently envisaged by the future Trump administration, is fundamentally at odds with international norms,” responded Arlington Musgrove, the Minister of Immigration of the Turks and Caicos, already facing a wave of immigration from Haiti.
“The Turks and Caicos will not participate in any program aimed at forcibly moving individuals here against their will or ours,” he insisted in a statement.
Case of Rwanda
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, for her part, expressed Thursday the hope that the future Trump administration would renew the agreement in force under which the United States expels illegal non-Mexican immigrants who entered their territory via Mexico directly to their countries. .
Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated as president of the United States on January 20, promised during the campaign that he would massively deport illegal immigrants.
Questioned by AFP on this subject on Thursday, his team did not respond.
It is not clear, according to NBC, whether this project would be subject to compensation from Washington, or what the status of migrants deported to these third countries could be.
Donald Trump used violent rhetoric towards migrants throughout the presidential campaign, accusing them of poisoning American “blood”, and promised to put an end to what he describes as an “invasion”.
In September he echoed lies that Haitian migrants were eating dogs and cats in Ohio.
The president-elect has already appointed hard-liners on the issue of immigration to key positions.
The idea of deporting illegal migrants to third countries or territories is not new.
Under Conservative rule, the UK discussed a plan with Rwanda to deport irregularly arriving asylum seekers to the East African country, before the new Labor government abandoned the plan. project this summer.
Australia signed a similar agreement with Cambodia in 2014 to settle refugees there, which was ultimately little used.
More recently, Giorgia Meloni’s Italy built detention centers in Albania to process asylum application procedures outside its territory, but this flagship measure of the far-right government is currently blocked by the courts.