Bahamas setback: What’s Trump’s plan to expel migrants to third countries? 

The Bahamas rejected a plan on Thursday to take immigrants from other countries who have been deported by the United States.

The plan to deport immigrants to countries including the Bahamas was reportedly proposed by the incoming Donald Trump administration in the US.

Republican President-elect Trump built his campaign around the promise of carrying out the “largest deportation operation” in US history.

Here is more about the plan:

What is Trump’s plan?

Trump’s team has a list of countries to which they want to send deported immigrants if their home countries refuse to accept them, NBC News reported on Thursday, citing three unnamed sources.

The outlet reported that, in addition to the Bahamas, Trump is considering the neighbouring Turks and Caicos Islands, as well as Panama and Grenada.

Further details, such as whether the immigrants would be allowed to work if they enter such a third country, are not known yet, NBC reported. It is also not known “what kind of pressure — either economic or diplomatic” Trump will place on the third countries to accept the immigrants.

Earlier, Trump has said that he is willing to declare a state of emergency and utilise the military to carry out mass deportations.

In a Thursday statement, the office of Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis said it had “reviewed and firmly rejected” the scheme to have the Bahamas accept deportation flights.

The Turks and Caicos Islands will also not welcome the deported immigrants, Arlington Musgrove, the minister of immigration and border services for the archipelago neighbouring the Bahamas said on Thursday, the Miami Herald reported.

Democratic outgoing President Joe Biden had applied a similar immigration measure during his tenure. In 2022, he started negotiating with Suriname to accept Afghan refugees held at a US base in Kosovo after they failed to meet entry requirements to the US, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2022, citing unnamed officials. According to the Miami Herald, Suriname recently agreed to accept those refugees.

Is this similar to the UK’s Rwanda plan?

In April 2022, under a Conservative Party government, the United Kingdom announced that it would send people seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda.

In November 2023, the UK Supreme Court declared the plan unlawful, citing safety concerns. However, the UK government signed a new treaty with Rwanda, adding security safeguards. In April of this year, the treaty was ratified and the Safety of Rwanda Act became law.

However, the Labour Party has since won the UK election in July and cancelled the Rwanda plan.

Are there other precedents?

Since 2016, Turkey has hosted refugees from Syria as a part of a deal with the European Union, where those fleeing the war in the Middle Eastern country were headed.

In May this year, 15 EU countries demanded that the bloc tighten its asylum policy to make it easier to transfer asylum seekers to third countries.

These countries included Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania.

In February, Italy and Albania signed a five-year deal for the European nation to transfer asylum seekers from “safe” countries to detention centres in Albania. But in November, seven asylum seekers from Bangladesh and Egypt were taken from Albania to Italy after an Italian court rejected the government’s request to detain them in the Balkan nation.

Why is Trump’s plan controversial?

Trump’s deportation plan intends to move people to countries to which they have no links.

A mass deportation plan would need the cooperation of many foreign governments.

In addition, many lawyers and activists argue that turning away asylum seekers fleeing violence or persecution represents a violation of international law.

During Trump’s first term, he carried out a similar measure between 2019 and 2020, placing immigrants on a plane to Guatemala. This move, smaller in scale than Trump’s current plan, was halted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The US civil rights nonprofit, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and other pro-immigrant rights groups sued Trump over this plan. The case is still pending in federal court.

“We sued over this type of policy during the first Trump administration because it was illegal and put asylum seekers at grave risk,” Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the ACLU, told NBC.

In November, the ACLU released a statement, saying, “We are crystal clear that the next Trump administration will do everything in its power to make mass deportation raids a reality.”