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I wonder if, in Donald Trump's America, the very word "immigrant" should be changed to something like "ex-migrant." The latest news, as I wrote this introduction, was that deporting immigrants to Venezuela, El Salvador, Panama, and other places in Central America wasn't faintly enough for the Trump administration. It was instead planning to deport a group of Asian migrants to Libya (despite a judge's order at least temporarily prohibiting it), itself a country in chaos with two governments. Will that happen? Who knows? Certainly, the Libyans seem less than eager to receive American ex-migrants.
But one thing is certain: when you combine the Trump administration's hatred of migrants with its chaotic approach to more or less anything, you have the makings of a genuine hell on Earth for anyone on this planet (other than a White South African perhaps) who might feel driven by conditions in his or her country or perhaps the increasing weather discomfort of the less wealthy world, hit the hardest so far by climate change, to somehow find a better life.
A better life? Not in the United States of America, that's for damn sure! Thank heavens, I can't go back in time and tell my grandfather, who at age 16, in the early 1890s, arrived here alone from what's now Ukraine looking for a better life and world, about the Trumpian anti-immigrant mess this country is becoming. And in the future, who knows just whom Donald Trump and crew might have the urge to throw out of this country? The thought should be scary, as TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino suggests today, even for those of us who aren't immigrants or even ex-migrants. Sigh" Tom
America the Unfree
Detention Practices in a Trumpy Post-9/11 Age
I don't know about you, but the news continues to stress me out. Trump administration officials are using any excuse they can think of to detain and deport people whose points of view -- or whose very existence on U.S. soil -- seem to threaten their agenda.
Deportations to El Salvador
In March, the U.S. government sent 238 men to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison where they no longer have contact with family members or lawyers, and where overcrowding and cruel practices like solitary confinement, or far worse, seem to be commonplace. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released few details about who the men were, but when pressed, DHS officials claimed that most of them were members of Tren de Agua, a Venezuelan criminal gang.
However, documents obtained by journalists revealed that about 75% of the detainees -- 179 of them -- had no criminal records. They had, in essence, been kidnapped. Among them was a young Venezuelan make-up artist who was in U.S. custody while awaiting a political asylum hearing. After he made a legal border crossing into this country, immigration officials determined that he was being targeted because he was gay and his political views. However, DHS officials claimed that the man's crown tattoos meant he was a member of Tren de Agua. It mattered not at all that those crowns had his parents' names underneath them, suggesting that his father and mother were his king and queen. As they have admitted, government officials are unable to substantiate why men like him were detained and deported without any legal process, though a spokeswoman for DHS claimed that many of them "are actually terrorists" They just don't have a rap sheet in the U.S."
Among those now detained in El Salvador is much-publicized Maryland resident and construction worker Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had lived in the U.S. since fleeing gang violence in his native El Salvador as a teenager. ICE agents arrested and detained him while he was driving with his five-year-old son in the backseat of his car. Trump administration officials did finally concede that he had been detained and deported due to an "administrative error." However, they later backtracked, claiming (without evidence) that he belonged to the violent criminal gang MS-13. The case rose to national prominence thanks to protest demonstrations and federal court orders for the Trump administration to "facilitate" his return. (No such luck, of course!)
I can't help wondering just how many other immigrants and refugees like him are now languishing in El Salvadorean prisons (or perhaps those of other countries) without the benefit of public pressure to challenge the conditions of their detention. And we can all keep wondering unless the Trump administration offers such deportees due process so that the legal system can vet their identities and the reasons for seizing and imprisoning them.
Asylum Seekers in Panama
These days, the horrors pile up so fast that it's hard to keep track of them. It seems like ages ago, but only last February the administration sent 300 asylum seekers to Panama City under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows State Department officials to deport citizens of foreign countries whose presence they believe to be contrary to this country's interests. After the Panamanian authorities locked the migrants in a hotel without access to their families or outsiders, they told them they had to return to their countries of origin.
Many of them feared for their lives if they did so. Among them was a young Cameroonian woman who had fled her country because the government there had imprisoned and tortured her for weeks after soldiers in her town accused her of membership in a separatist political group, and a mother and daughter who had fled Turkey for fear of imprisonment for participating in peaceful anti-government protests there.
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