A DEAL SHROUDED IN SECRECY

A DEAL SHROUDED IN SECRECY

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Guyana’s Third-Country Migrants and the Silence That Surrounds Them

On September 4, six migrants — Cuban and Afghan nationals — landed in Guyana under a newly finalized migration cooperation framework with the United States. The Government of Guyana confirmed their arrival the following day, in a press statement carried in full by local media. What the statement did not say has since become the more important story.

No vetting authority has been named. No accommodation site has been disclosed. No legal basis under Guyanese or international refugee law has been cited, because none exists: Guyana is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, and has no domestic asylum legislation. And the framework itself — the instrument governing who arrives, under what conditions, for how long — was never brought before the National Assembly. There is no Hansard record. There was no debate.

This is not a story about six people. It is a story about a government that entered a binding arrangement with a foreign power, over the movement and custody of human beings onto Guyanese soil, without informing the institution constitutionally charged with scrutinizing it.

WHAT WAS CONFIRMED 

Senior officials have, when pressed by wire services, offered fragments. A 12-month initial term. A cap of 12 persons per month, with no roll-over. Costs of “receiving, housing and supporting” arrivals borne by the International Organization for Migration. Assurances — offered, not demonstrated — that only non-criminal, “highly skilled” individuals denied asylum in the US would be accepted, and that Guyana retains a right of refusal.

None of this appeared in a treaty. None of it was tabled, gazetted, or subjected to parliamentary question. The underlying instrument is understood to be a diplomatic note; a category of agreement that, by design, bypasses the ratification scrutiny a treaty would require. That is not an incidental detail. It is the mechanism by which an arrangement of this consequence was kept outside the reach of elected oversight.

THE GUARDIAN’S INVESTIGATION

The scale of what Guyana has joined only becomes legible in wider context. A joint investigation by the Guardian and 23 other media organisations — coordinated by Paris-based Forbidden Stories under the banner of the Deportation Project — has tracked more than 100 flights carrying migrants and asylum seekers to 28 countries under the Trump administration’s third-country removal programme.

More than 25,000 people have been deported to countries that are not their own; over 5,000 of them to nations in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and central Asia to which they have no prior connection

Human rights lawyers describe the practice as a “show of force” — a deterrent theatre staged at the expense of people whose claims to protection had, in many cases, already been recognised by US immigration judges. One Iranian woman interviewed by the Guardian, granted “withholding of removal” after fleeing political persecution, was rearrested within two weeks of her release and flown to the Central African Republic — a country the US State Department itself warns its own citizens not to enter.

The pattern the investigation documents is not unique to Guyana. Peruvians and Colombians have been sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cubans, a Brazilian and a Cameroonian who refused to disembark in Liberia were redirected to Equatorial Guinea instead. Documents reviewed by the Washington Post as part of the project show that a majority of the 35 countries that have signed third-country agreements with Washington stipulated they would not accept migrants with violent criminal records — the same non-criminal framing Guyanese officials have offered the public, suggesting this is boilerplate language attached to the entire cohort of agreements, not a bespoke Guyanese safeguard.

A RULING THAT SHOULD CONCERN GEORGETOWN

On Friday, a US federal appeals court ruled that third-country removals of the kind that brought six people to Guyana are unlawful, on the grounds that individuals are not given adequate notice to mount a legal challenge before being sent to a country that is not their own. The Trump administration is expected to appeal and to continue the program regardless.

The ruling does not change what has already happened in Guyana. But it confirms, from within the US legal system itself, the precise defect that has defined this arrangement from the Guyanese side as well: people moved, and agreements struck, without the notice — to the individuals concerned, and to the Guyanese public — that due process requires.

THE UNEXPLAINED VISIT

Six weeks before the framework was announced, IOM Director General Amy Pope visited Guyana and met with five government ministers. Every published account of that visit; IOM’s own release, its regional syndication, Guyana Chronicle’s written coverage; describes it exclusively in terms of labor migration, GDP growth, and CARICOM migration governance. None names the ministers involved beyond a group reference. None mentions a deportee framework, then under active negotiation according to Foreign Secretary Robert Persaud’s own January 2026 remarks to iNews Guyana.

No public record shows Pope meeting Guyana’s Venezuelan Ambassador — despite Venezuelans constituting the country’s largest migrant population, and despite that being the obvious counterpart for a visit genuinely centred on labour migration. Six weeks later, IOM was named the framework’s sole implementer for housing and supporting arrivals who are neither Venezuelan nor economic migrants in any sense the public visit’s stated purpose would suggest.

The 592 Guardian does not assert what was discussed behind closed doors in that meeting. What can be stated is narrower and, in its way, more damning: the public record offers no account of Pope’s visit that squares with the role IOM was assigned six weeks later, and no institution; not Cabinet, not the National Assembly, not the ministries involved — has offered one since.

WHAT IS OWED

A government that signs an arrangement determining who may be brought onto Guyanese soil, under whose custody, and at what risk to them if returned to danger, owes the public more than a press release confirming the fact after arrivals have already landed. It owes Parliament the instrument itself. It owes citizens a named vetting authority, a disclosed location, and a legal basis that either exists or is admitted not to.

None of that has been offered. What has been offered is silence — the same silence into which six people arrived, and the same silence in which the terms of their presence, and the presence of twelve  more who may follow each month, remain undisclosed.

— The Board