The principle of non-refoulement, a cornerstone of international refugee and human rights law, bans nations from sending any individual back to a territory where they face credible threats of persecution, torture, inhumane treatment, or irreversible harm. This foundational rule is now casting a long shadow over a proposed immigration deal between the United States and small Caribbean nations like Antigua and Barbuda, where Washington is pushing to offload the burden of migrants who have entered the U.S. illegally, been denied asylum, or overstayed their visas. The plan, championed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, has sparked heated debate over its racial undertones, legal ambiguities, and tangible risks for small host states.
Trump’s well-documented history of racially charged rhetoric on immigration frames the context of this proposal. In 2018, he infamously labeled Haiti, El Salvador, and a host of African nations “shithole countries,” and doubled down on this stance in 2025, calling for a “permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, [and] Somalia.” He has openly questioned why the U.S. cannot prioritize immigration from majority-white Nordic countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark instead. This rhetoric makes clear the racial bias at the core of the current U.S. administration’s immigration policy, argues Franchesca Sterling, an OAS child advocate and author of this analysis.
Sterling points out that Trump’s willingness to frame migrants as commodities to be “exported” or “imported” echoes the dehumanizing language of chattel slavery, a framing that she says enables bigotry and echoes harmful patterns of racial exploitation. As a humanist who has worked for eight years as a volunteer child advocate with the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, supporting unaccompanied minor migrants in the U.S. system, Sterling emphasizes that she holds no anti-immigrant sentiment. Instead, she argues that the proposed third-country national (TCN) deportation deal poses avoidable legal, social, and public health risks to Antigua and Barbuda that the government has not publicly addressed.
The core legal risk, Sterling explains, stems directly from the principle of non-refoulement. If Antigua and Barbuda agrees to accept TCNs deported from the U.S. — even those without criminal records who do not qualify as “bona fide visitors” under Antigua and Barbuda’s existing immigration law — the nation would be barred from deporting those individuals onward if they commit crimes or violate local laws later. Without a clear agreement requiring the U.S. to take back individuals who become Antigua and Barbuda’s responsibility after they are resettled, the small nation would be left holding an unplanned and unsustainable burden. While existing Antigua and Barbuda law places the cost of repatriation on the carrier or agent that brings an unauthorized migrant to the nation’s shores, it remains unclear whether the U.S. government would honor this requirement under the proposed bilateral deal.
Sterling also outlines a series of unanswered legal questions that the Antigua and Barbuda government has yet to resolve. Will the government reclassify deported TCNs as “bona fide visitors” upon arrival? If so, who will bear the cost of their housing, food, and social support during their stay — effectively making the Antigua and Barbuda government their official sponsor? If they are not reclassified, what will their legal status be in the country? Under the 2014 Immigration and Passport Act, entry rights can be extended to new groups of people via ministerial order, but TCNs deported from the U.S. are not explicitly named in existing legislation. It remains unclear whether the government will issue such an order, or whether the plan will require full parliamentary approval, a key transparency question that has yet to be addressed publicly.
Practical documentation challenges add another layer of complexity. Most migrants targeted for deportation from the U.S. entered without valid passports or travel documents, many of which were destroyed during their journey to North America. For large shares of these individuals, formal identity documents such as birth certificates are impossible to obtain: slow bureaucratic processes at foreign consulates based in the U.S. leave many applications stuck in limbo, and many migrants were born in remote rural communities where births were never formally registered with their home government.
Public health is another critical underaddressed risk. The U.S. requires all incoming migrants to complete a full slate of vaccinations — including influenza, Hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, meningococcal disease, pneumococcal disease, and varicella — as well as screening for tuberculosis, HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and mental health conditions. Sterling questions whether Antigua and Barbuda will enforce the same strict health requirements, given the strain that unaddressed public health issues could place on the nation’s small healthcare system. She also notes that while U.S. rules accept laboratory evidence of immunity for migrants without formal vaccination records, Antigua and Barbuda’s existing immigration law requires all arriving migrants to be examined by a licensed medical practitioner to verify their health status, a requirement she strongly recommends the government uphold if the deal moves forward.
Data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for 2024–2025 shows that the largest groups of individuals ordered deported from the U.S. come from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, and Peru — with Mexico accounting for the largest share due to its shared border with the U.S. Other major nationalities include migrants from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, China, Jamaica, the Philippines, Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and a range of European, Asian, and African nations. Sterling emphasizes that many people from these countries already live legally and productively in Antigua and Barbuda, a welcoming small twin-island nation of fewer than 100,000 people that has a long history of hosting visitors and new residents. It is not opposition to migration, but a commitment to protecting Antigua and Barbuda’s national interest that drives her call for greater transparency and scrutiny of the proposed deal.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this analysis are the author’s own.
