Antigua and Barbuda

The Coalition’s position. This state agreed to receive people who are not its nationals, moved against their will, under a programme United States federal courts have found punitive and whose purpose was stated publicly before the agreement was made. On the Coalition’s position it has knowingly facilitated that programme, and the wrong is complete at the moment of agreement. Nothing on this page is offered as mitigation. What a receiving state agrees to.

What has happened, and what has not

Antigua and Barbuda signed a memorandum of understanding with the United States on 19 December 2025. Nobody has been transferred. Nearly nine months later there is still no operating agreement, because Parliament has not authorised one and the Government has set conditions the United States has not met. Of every state in this section, this is the one where the process has been most public and has produced least.

Why there is no Federal Register notice here, and what that does and does not mean

For Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize there are Federal Register notices, published as unreadable page images. For the Caribbean instruments there are none, and the reason is statutory rather than furtive. Binding international agreements are published by the United States Secretary of State in the Federal Register and in the treaty series. Instruments classified as non-binding are not: they go to a separate library of qualifying non-binding instruments. So the absence of a notice is what the law produces for an instrument of this class, and the Coalition does not present it as concealment.

What is a finding is that the text is not in that library either. The newest material there when the Coalition looked was from July 2025. So the instrument is neither in the place binding agreements go nor in the place non-binding ones go.

The asylum system a person would be placed into, in the Government’s own words

This page quotes the White Paper at length because no advocacy organisation has put the problem better than the receiving government did.

Antigua and Barbuda acceded to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol on 7 September 1995. The White Paper acknowledges that if a transferred person expresses fear of return, those obligations “are immediately triggered”, that “the person must be allowed to apply for protection and cannot be returned, including to the United States, if doing so would expose them to persecution”.

Then it says what the country actually has. “Antigua has no standalone Refugees Act.” Claims are “handled ad hoc under the general Immigration Act, with protection access determined informally in cooperation with” the United Nations refugee agency. That agency has no office in Antigua and Barbuda; in practice a claim reaches its Panama office by email. No caseload figures are published.

And then it states the consequence. A person would “arrive in a legal grey zone”, being “simultaneously a potential asylum seeker, a de facto stateless person, and an undocumented migrant”, “with Antigua and Barbuda holding treaty obligations it has no domestic legislation specifically designed to fulfil, and very little means to undertake”. It identifies the trap directly: if the person cannot be sent to their country of origin, because it refuses them or because sending them would breach non-refoulement, and cannot be returned to the United States, then “they become non-removable”.

On detention, the Immigration and Passport Act provides that an officer may detain a person required to be removed or deported, in such place as the Chief Immigration Officer determines. An Immigration Appeals Tribunal exists, with onward appeal to the High Court and the Court of Appeal, which is a review route several comparator states lack. Which immigration statute is currently in force is contested between three sources and the Coalition has not resolved it.

What the United States did, on the documents

Two separate United States measures bear on this country and the Coalition keeps them apart, because merging them would overstate the case.

The Coalition sets that sequence out and declines to characterise it. The monitoring project reports the Prime Minister as saying the restrictions were issued to bully the country into signing; the Coalition could not locate the primary report carrying that quotation and does not repeat it as his words. The documented sequence is stronger than the quotation and does not need it.

One figure from the parliamentary debate belongs here because it is unusual and because it was disclosed rather than leaked. The Prime Minister said Antigua and Barbuda intends to seek up to seventy-five thousand United States dollars for each person accepted, on the ground that its cost of living is higher than that of other participating states.

Who could find out

Antigua and Barbuda acceded to the Convention against Torture on 19 July 1993. It has made no declaration under article 21 and none under article 22, so no individual there can petition the Committee against Torture. It is not a party to the Optional Protocol, so there is no preventive mechanism and no Subcommittee visit. It is not a party to the American Convention and does not accept the contentious jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court; as a member of the regional organisation it remains within the Inter-American Commission’s petition system, which produces reports that do not bind.

An Ombudsman exists under an Act of 1994, with a mandate to investigate complaints against government departments and statutory bodies, free of charge, whose recommendations are expressly non-binding. It is not a national human rights institution in the Paris Principles sense and holds no accreditation. Whether a person who is not a national may complain to it is not stated anywhere the Coalition could read.

One thing cuts the other way and is recorded as such. After the Committee against Torture’s last examination, follow-up information was requested and the Committee later recorded that no response was received from the State party. But engagement has since resumed: Antigua and Barbuda accepted the simplified reporting procedure in June 2024 and the Committee adopted its list of issues in May 2025. That is movement after three decades of silence.

The first days

Nothing below is advice, and no page can tell a particular person what to do in their case.

Who is reachable in Antigua and Barbuda

Printed only where the Coalition could verify the source and date it. No contact details for the Department of Immigration could be obtained; its contact page could not be reached and none is printed. No legal aid body and no organisation taking individual protection or detention cases was identified, and the Coalition states that as a finding rather than as a gap in effort.

What runs the other way

More than on any other page in this section, and it is set out at length because the evidence requires it.

Parliament refused to approve an agreement, and said so in terms. That is a legislature constraining an executive, in public, on this subject.

The Government published a legal assessment of its own incapacity and debated it for a day. No other receiving state the Coalition has examined has produced anything comparable, and the Government’s analysis is more critical than most external analysis.

The conditions it has set are real safeguards, and several of them are the ones that are missing elsewhere: no expedited removal cases, no unaccompanied children, nobody with a pending protection claim in the United States, funding committed in writing in advance, a right to refuse on arrival with return at United States expense, and a right to suspend.

It has met its own obligations towards its own nationals, accepting the return of all five identified between March 2025 and the middle of 2026. The Government’s two accounts differ on whether the period ended in June or July; the number is the same.

There is an appeal tribunal and a route to the courts.

Engagement with the Committee against Torture has restarted after a long silence.

The visa pause was ended by an American court, not by an Antiguan concession.

What is not established

The text of the memorandum, its formal title, its signatories, and whether it has any commencement or termination clause. Nobody outside the two governments appears to have read it.

Whether it was ever published under the non-binding instruments provision. The library shows nothing later than July 2025.

Which immigration statute is currently in force. Three sources disagree.

Whether a person who is not a national may complain to the Ombudsman.

A report the Coalition could not open, and will not drop. A regional news outlet has published an item whose headline attributes to the Prime Minister a statement that Antigua and Barbuda would not accept lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people transferred under such arrangements. The article could not be retrieved and the Coalition has not read it. It is recorded here as unverified and outstanding, without being quoted or characterised, because if it is accurate it would qualify every safeguard set out above, and because dropping an inconvenient unverified report is how pages go wrong.

The Coalition writes Investigating rather than none found, because the second phrase reads as though a question has been answered when it has only been asked.

What this page does not yet carry

The memorandum itself, and the draft operating procedures the Government says have been under discussion.

Any verified contact for the Department of Immigration, for legal aid, or for any organisation in the country taking individual cases.

The outcome of the diplomatic note of 2 August 2026 seeking review of the proclamation.

If you can correct anything on this page, the Coalition wants to hear it.

Sources

Every source relied on above, linked so it can be read in full rather than through this summary.

The Government’s own account. Government of Antigua and Barbuda, White Paper on the United States proposal for arrangements to transfer third country nationals removed from the United States, 9 July 2026, sections 2 and 3, from which every quotation about the asylum system and the legal position is taken. CARIBPULSE, 14 July 2026, for the parliamentary resolution and the remarks of the Prime Minister, the Attorney General, the Foreign Affairs Minister, the Tourism Minister and the member for Barbuda. Jamaica Gleaner, 3 August 2026, for the diplomatic note seeking review.

The United States measures. Proclamation 10998, restricting and limiting the entry of foreign nationals, signed 16 December 2025 and published 19 December 2025 at 90 Federal Register 59717, section 5(b). United States Department of State, immigrant visa processing updates, last updated 28 August 2026, for the pause of 21 January 2026 covering seventy-five countries and its end on 21 August 2026 by court order. United States Department of State, library of qualifying non-binding instruments, in which no text for this instrument appears.

Transfers. Third Country Deportation Watch, Antigua and Barbuda page, last updated 18 August 2026, recording that no transfers are known to have occurred. United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, tracker, updated July 2026, which does not cover the country.

Treaty status, from the depositary. United Nations Treaty Collection, chapters V-2 and V-5 for the refugee instruments, accession 7 September 1995; IV-9 for the Convention against Torture, accession 19 July 1993, with Antigua and Barbuda absent from the declarations section; IV-9-b for the Optional Protocol, to which it is not a party. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, states accepting contentious jurisdiction, from which it is absent.

Compiled 11 September 2026. Where this page summarises a decision or a report, the full document is linked above and should be read in preference to this summary. Where a document could not be opened, this page says so rather than quoting it at second hand as though it had been read. Long quotations from the White Paper are given in fragments where the original uses dashes, so that the Coalition’s house style does not silently alter a quotation. Two claims were removed before publication: a figure of up to ten people a year, which is this Government’s unaccepted counter-proposal and not an agreed term; and a statement that the absence of a Federal Register notice shows concealment, when it is what the relevant United States statute produces for an instrument of this class. Corrections to the Coalition.