Jamaica Now Takes America's Deportees. Jamaicans Aren't Allowed to Read the Deal.

For decades, the deportation flights ran one way. They brought Jamaica's own sons and daughters home to Norman Manley with a bag, a case number, and a country they barely remembered. On October 13 the flight ran the other way. Twenty-two people who weren't Jamaican stepped off a plane in Kingston, sent by a country that didn't want them to one most had never seen. The deal behind it was signed in June, and Jamaicans are not allowed to read it. What they know has come out in pieces: twenty-five arrivals every two weeks at most, and the whole thing stops if ten people ask for asylum. The Foreign Minister says Washington won't agree to release the text. She also says, "There are countries which have agreed to receive criminals... Jamaica is not one of them." Put those two sentences side by side and you get the shape of the problem: a promise about who boards the plane, backed by a document the public isn't allowed to see. A small island has quietly taken on part of America's deportation machine, and the people it answers to are finding out the rules at the same pace as the passengers.