Jamaica: St Ann police link detained Haitians to cholera, dengue and malaria

The group, twelve adults and four children, was found on Tuesday, 20 October, at Mammee Bay on the island's north coast, during a security forces operation that ran from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. They are suspected of living in the country illegally. According to Russell, some of them are visitors who overstayed their visas. A medical team and officers from the Passport, Immigration and Citizenship Agency (PICA) are processing them. Police say further operations will look for Haitians they believe are hiding in the parish.

These are heavy words, and nothing made public supports them. No medical finding on these sixteen people has been released. Dengue and malaria are spread by mosquitoes, not by giving someone a roof. Dengue, for that matter, does not need Haiti to circulate in Jamaica: the Jamaican Ministry of Health declared an outbreak on 23 September 2023, and by early November the country counted more than 3,000 suspected, presumed or confirmed cases. Cholera is indeed circulating in Haiti, according to the US CDC, and in the Caribbean malaria is endemic only on the island of Hispaniola. But pinning a disease on a nationality, without a diagnosis, brands whole families, children included, as a threat.

Jamaica is no stranger to the gang crisis that drives so many Haitians to leave. Its soldiers and police officers have been in Haiti since 12 September 2024, first in the Kenya-led mission, then in the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) created by the UN in October 2025. A Jamaica Defence Force officer, Brigadier E. C. Clarke, is its deputy force commander. Kingston fights gangs in Haiti while its police describe Haitians as carriers of disease.

The two countries are also tied by a long-running trade. According to InSight Crime, Jamaican boats carry marijuana to Haiti and return loaded with guns. In 2020, Anthony Clayton, a security specialist at the University of the West Indies, estimated that 150 to 200 firearms moved from Haiti to Jamaica every month, with about twenty criminal organisations sharing the trade.

The detainees, for their part, ask for little. According to an interpreter for the Haitian community quoted by TVJ, they are not refusing to go back to Haiti, but want to be able to buy their own plane tickets rather than be repatriated by boat.

This is the third group of Haitians to arrive in Jamaica in recent weeks. Just over a week earlier, 23 people were detained in St Thomas. In September, 11 others were held in Portland. On 29 September, seven Haitians, including a 13-year-old, were arrested at a traffic stop in Ocho Rios, then repatriated in early October.

Jamaica helps fight the gangs in Haiti. It can also treat the people fleeing that country as neighbours, not as a disease.