The News
The Bahamas said it would reject US President-elect Donald Trump’s reported plans to take in deported migrants.
“This matter was presented to the Government of The Bahamas but was reviewed and firmly rejected by the Prime Minister,” a statement from the office Prime Minister Philip Davis said. “The Bahamas simply does not have the resources to accommodate such a request.”
The Trump transition team included other Caribbean islands like Turks and Caicos and Grenada as part of a list of countries where the US would deport migrants if their home countries did not accept them, NBC News reported.
In his first term, Trump returned asylum-seekers to Guatemala as part of an agreement between the two countries, and the practice continued until 2020. Trump is also pressuring the Mexican government to accept non-Mexicans deported from the US, sources told NBC News.
Policies to deport migrants to third-party countries has gained momentum among some European countries. The UK in 2022 controversially signed an agreement with Rwanda to accept migrants while processing their asylum claims — a plan that ran into numerous legal hurdles before being scrapped by Prime Minister Keir Starmer.