Declaring that it was compelled to break its silence on the controversial Third Country National (TCN) deportees’ arrangement between the United States and Jamaica, the Jamaica Council of Churches (JCC) has rebuked the Government over what it said was a troubling structural double standard in the country’s migration governance.In a statement signed by Reverend Garth Minott, president of the JCC, the church group observed that for decades, successive administrations in Jamaica have pleaded a lack of systemic capacity, fiscal room, and infrastructural resources to justify the rapid, unceremonious repatriation of spontaneous regional arrivals.  The JCC referenced the country’s neighbours “fleeing the harrowing humanitarian catastrophe in nearby Haiti”.“We have been told repeatedly that Jamaica cannot absorb the vulnerable at our gates. Yet, when a proposal is brokered with a global superpower, our structural incapacity is suddenly set aside to accommodate a specialized transit apparatus.”It argues that public policy is a sacred trust because it is intimately tied to human life and dignity, adding that when that is weakened by opportunism, the consequences are felt most acutely by the vulnerable.“To turn away the desperate seafaring migrant while opening an official transit pipeline for a superpower’s unwanted populations is to be found fundamentally wanting in the scales of justice. We cannot trade our moral birth right for political expediency or foreign assistance dividends,” the JCC warned.CLARIFICATIONThe JCC said it noted recent clarifications by National Security Minister Dr Horace Chang, who denied initial media reports of a massive 10,000-person quota. But despite Chang’s explanation that Jamaica would serve as a temporary transit point hosting no more than 10 individuals at a time, the JCC said its “core ethical and systemic anxieties remain completely un-allayed”.The church body also raised concern about what it describes as a troubling cloak of secrecy regarding the arrangement. It said a primary and deeply distressing dimension of this developing arrangement is the total lack of transparency surrounding its operational frameworks.Noting that the Council, alongside the wider Jamaican public, has not been made aware of the specific details of this arrangement, the JCC reasoned that when statecraft takes place behind closed doors, it evades necessary ethical and democratic audit.The JCC has urged Chang and the Office of the Prime Minister to tell Jamaicans why persons being sent to third-party partner countries like Jamaica rather than their country of origin?  It also wants the architects of the policy to comment on whether direct repatriation to their homeland would have made more sense?Further, the JCC is seeking a response to this question: “If the sending authorities harbour genuine, legitimate safety or security concerns about the deportee’s home country, how is sending them to a third country going to help mitigate that situation?”According to the church group, shifting human displacement from one shore to another does nothing to heal the root causes of regional and global instability; it merely outsources the logistical burden.