Editorial | Prepare for deportees

The disclosure that the United States plans to send home nearly 4,000 Jamaicans as part of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown raises questions of how well prepared is the Government to accept the deportees, including what checks it has done, or is doing, of their backgrounds.

For while all, or even the majority, of the returnees may not be hardcore criminals, or have no significant criminal records, some may indeed do. If past analyses still hold, even a small proportion of hardened criminals could pose difficult problems for the society.

In any event, reintegrating 3,900 people – the number the national security minister, Horace Chang, said is designated for deportation – would itself be a serious challenge, especially if some of them, having been away for a long time, have no real roots in, or connection to, the island.

With an estimated undocumented immigrants in the United States, the white ethno-nationalist Mr Trump made aggressive removal of “illegal aliens” a centrepiece of his campaign for his second stint at the presidency. Since taking office, he has robustly pursued this agenda.

For example, on the pretext of fighting anti-Semitism on liberal, elite university campuses, the Trump administration has revoked the student visas (and in some cases green cards) of foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations protesting Israel’s prosecution of its war in Gaza against Hamas.

In an extreme move, the administration has also barred Harvard University, an Ivy League institution, from recruiting foreign students. It is part of the administration’s retaliation for Harvard’s failure to submit to government oversight, or to provide information on its foreign students.

Some foreign faculty members of other elite universities have not escaped the administration’s scrutiny, including, in at least one case, a Jamaican professor at one of America’s top schools.

In recent days, too, the administration ordered US embassies and consulates worldwide, including in Kingston, to halt the processing of student visas, allowing time for reviews of applicants’ social media posts.

GREATER URGENCY

But Mr Trump’s anti-immigration policy, especially with respect to people from the Global South, is being played out with even greater urgency, and dramatic effect, in communities across America. People are being held and deported, often without due process, and sometimes in defiance of courts.

For example, hundreds of Venezuelans, who the administration claimed to be gang members, were summarily sent to a government detention centre in El Salvador, whose president, Nayib Bukele, declared his willingness to take more for a fee. Others have been sent to war-torn Libya.

According to latest data from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), in the current fiscal year, thus far (October 1, 2024 up to March 8) it removed 71,405 people from the United States, of whom just over 17,000 or 24 per cent had criminal convictions. Another 6,369, or eight per cent, had pending criminal charges. Sixty-seven per cent of the deportees also faced other specific immigration violations. In some cases people fall in multiple categories.

It is not clear when the Jamaicans who Dr Chang said are facing deportation were rounded up.

However, the ICE portal indicated that up to the latest posting in March, 157 Jamaicans were already removed from the United States in FY25, across all categories of causes. Nearly two-thirds of them (65 per cent) had criminal convictions. Another 12 had pending criminal charges and 43 (27 per cent) were deemed to be also immigration violators.

For the entirety of the previous fiscal year, America deported 446 Jamaicans, including 341 (76 per cent) with criminal convictions.

STRATEGICALLY PREPARED

Quite possibly, some of the crimes for which people were, and will be, deported, may well be petty, especially given this administration’s posture on immigration. Nonetheless, some of the deportees are also possibly hardened criminals, for whom the country has to be strategically prepared.

Indeed, several studies across Latin America and the Caribbean have shown that returned criminals can impact their countries’ crime rates, especially homicides.

A 2010 study by Garfield Blake, now an associate professor in economics at the University of Tampa, estimated 23 per cent of the increase in intentional homicides in Latin America between 1985 and 1996 (a period when homicides rose 75 per cent) was attributable “to the increase in the criminal deportation reception rate”.

Earlier, a group of researchers (Annmarie Barnes, Barry Chevannes and Andrea McCalla) at The University of the West Indies, who looked at the deportee question, suggested criminal returnees impacted the domestic crime problem. Some even admitted in interviews to their involvement in crime.

But even deportees who were not criminals before being sent to Jamaica, were sometimes lured into crime because of difficulty adjusting to their new environment, drug use, or homelessness.

Jamaica cannot, and ought not to, prevent its citizens from returning to the island. Their entry is a legal and moral obligation. But in circumstances such as the island faces, and in the context of Jamaica’s already serious crime problem, the Government and law enforcement agencies have to be prepared.

That, however, doesn’t mean arbitrary abridgement of people’s constitutional rights and freedoms. It may mean, in some instances, giving people a leg up.