President Donald Trump’s immigration plan revealed a key but slightly recognized truth. Deportation is not one -sided. Requires an agreement between two countries – those who expel people and those who receive them.
President Trump has made mass deportations a question of signature. In days since he laid the oath, ICE agents spent high raids and sent military and charter planes that transported unfathomable immigrants back to their country of origin.
This has led to a diplomatic friction: a A flight of lagged deported to Brazil has attracted protests from its governmentAnd President Gustavo Petro from Colombia refused to allow two US military aircraft transporting deportation to Earth, Launching diplomatic confrontation This led to the threat of American tariff before Colombia eventually gave up.
The disputes have shown that one thing is that Trump’s administration is detained by unproven immigrants, and quite another to actually deport them. Sending people to another country requires bilateral negotiations – and, in the last week, rather diplomatic armed.
Trump’s administration also seems to work on strengthening its diplomatic influence. On Wednesday, the President posted plans to establish a Detention camp at a US military base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánam to attract the worst criminal illegal aliens that threaten the American people,” said President Trump. “Some of them are so bad that we do not even believe the countries to hold them, because we do not want to return, so we will send them to Guantánamo.”
Deportation is negotiating
According to international law, countries are obliged to accommodate their own citizens who are deported by another country. But in practice, there are often ways to push away. The countries can block flights of landing from landing, refuse to issue travel documents to their citizens and refuse to admit that their citizens are deports.
“The legal situation is very clear,” said Gerald Knaus, president of the European Stability initiative, who helped establish an agreement on a high profile deportation between the European Union and Turkey in 2016. The countries you want to take to people do not admit that they are their citizens. “
In the past, very few countries have refused to fully accept deportation from the United States, said Dara Lind, a senior associate at the US immigration council. But some, often called “unwavering” countries, have set up restrictions on how many flights of deportations they accept from whom. Since 2020, the United States has declared 13 countries “immobile”, including China, India and Cuba.
“China will occasionally take flights of deportations, but it doesn’t take almost as much as the US government would like, and certainly not nearly as much as it would be enough to deport the number of unauthorized Chinese nationals in the USA,” Lind said. And while Cuba started Taking some flights of deportation in 2017, after significant negotiations of Obama’s administration, it continues to limit the number of deported to accept.
Carrots and sticks
When they now want to deport people, there are four main opportunities: the negotiations of “good police officers” who offer diplomatic incentives to countries to accept their deported citizens; Negotiations “bad cop” who do the same through threats and coercion; Finding a third country ready to accept deportation; Or just allowing migrants to stay in the United States to the forestiguities.
Perverse, enemy countries to the United States can be in a stronger position to draw incentives for good, while friendly allies will be more sensitive to threats with bad shelves, such as tariffs.
Venezuela, for example, stopped accepting deportations last year after the US presented sanctions, but President Nicolás Maduro indicated that he would consider a change in his policy in exchange for economic incentives from the United States. In contrast, countries like Colombia, with strong trade connections with the United States, must lose more than new tariffs and other forced measures.
The contracts of third countries, in which countries agree to accept deportation that are not their own citizens are relatively rare, but they exist.
Australia has been paying the Government of Papue New Guinea and Nauro for years Hosts custody centers for asylum seekers who tried to reach Australia by boat. The program was eventually stopped after numerous legal challenges.
In 2016, the European Union gave Turkish cash and other incentives in exchange for accepting the Syrian asylum seekers and other unfathomable migrants deported from the European Union, as part of the effort to stop the migration crisis in which more than one million people entered Europe with land and the sea , many of them from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
One big question for Trump’s administration is whether he can convince Mexico to accept deported from other countries. President Claudia Sheinbaum had previously vowed not to do so. But at a press conference this week, she said that Mexico received 4,000 deported and that “the vast majority” – but not all – Mexicans.
President Trump has already threatened to impose 25 percent of Tariff Mexico if he no longer did to prevent migrants from reaching the US border and stopping the smartering of the fentanis. Deportations can become part of these wider negotiations.
Guantánamo option
President Trump, with the opening of a guantic migrant camp, could effectively create an option for a third country without negotiating with the second government. Non -soperative countries like Colombia could be forced to choose from accepting flights of deportation from the United States or their citizens of posture in a detainee camp.
My colleague Carol Rosenberg has for decades have been covered by a prison institution of Pentagon in Guantánam, since the first detainees were brought there from Afghanistan in January 2002.
She and our colleague Hamed Aleaziz reported this week that several US presidential administrations have prepared a place in Guantánam to potentially accept tens of thousands of migrants in the extended tent city. The proposed place could be surrounded by a barbed wire, as the army did for tent camps in the 1990s, which were placed in accommodation and families and single men when about 45,000 people fled Cuba and Haiti.
Some experts have questioned the legality of residential migrants based. “Guantánamo is a black hole intended to avoid supervision of the dark history of inhumane conditions. It is a transparent attempt to avoid legal supervision that will succeed,” Lucas Guttenag, an official of the Ministry of Justice in the Administration of Biden, told them.
Even if the detention plan survives legal challenges, the utility of the Guantánamo object would just go so far. The detention for 30,000 people is enormous, compared to 40,000 immigrants who are currently held in private detention centers and local prisons in the United States. But Guantánamo would hold only a small part Millions of migrants that President Trump has committed to deportedAnd it would be expensive to act indefinitely.
The Cuban government, which has long considered the American base illegally, said in a statement that holding tens of thousands of people would “create a scenario of risk and insecurity”.
Additional reporting Ed Augustine in Havana.
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