The Trump Administration’s Cruelty Knows No Bounds [Op-Ed]

The Trump administration is regularly deporting undocumented migrants to countries they are not from and have never lived. This practice existed in the federal government before President Donald Trump’s emergence into U.S. politics, but it was always reserved for rare and special circumstances that decidedly warranted it.

Under Trump — who makes his disdain for Black and brown migrants, documented or not, unmistakably known on a daily basis — a migrant from a “third world” country is a migrant from a “third world” country, and when it comes to sending them anywhere that isn’t the U.S., any old “third world” country will do.

In Florida, for example, Cubans are being deported by the federal government to Africa, including regions of the continent that the federal government has declared too dangerous for Americans to travel to.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, 32-year-old Yasmany Moreno, who traveled between Tampa and Miami for work after coming to the U.S. as an asylum seeker under temporary protected status (TPS), is one of many immigrants of Cuban descent who found themselves stranded in various regions of Africa. 

Moreno had already spent more than a year in immigration detention centers across the U.S. when, to his complete shock, he was put on a plane and deported to Africa. That was July 30. He said he wasn’t told where he was going until five hours into the flight.

From the Times:

“I honestly thought it was a bad joke because the officer laughed, like he was making fun of me,” Moreno said.

A month after arriving in the Central African Republic, Moreno and 35 other immigrants deported on a 21-hour flight remain in Bangui, the country’s capital, without passports and no information about what will happen next. They stay at the Maison Confort, a modest hotel located in a busy neighborhood near central Bangui.

Moreno said they feel forgotten and fear they could be moved to another country. He said African authorities told them they may have to leave the room where they are staying within 90 days. He started an online fundraiser to help himself and other deportees start over in Bangui.

“It is a completely inhumane situation,” Moreno told the Tampa Bay Times via WhatsApp. “What are we doing here? It is a question we ask ourselves every day.”

The U.S. Department of State previously warned U.S. travelers not to travel to the Central African Republic for any reason “due to unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health and terrorism.” Yet, the Trump administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are defending stranding asylum seekers in dangerous countries they’re unfamiliar with, saying it’s  using “all lawful options” to carry out what it called “the largest deportation operation in history.”

“When an individual is no longer in ICE custody then ICE will no longer be responsible for them,” an ICE spokesperson told the Times. “This is common sense.”

Yeah — more like uncommon cruelty.

According to the Miami Herald, Moreno is far from the only Cuban migrant who experienced being shackled alongside his fellow countrymen and put on flights to destinations unknown, only to become aware en route that they were headed to somewhere in Africa.

Carlos Rodriguez Lopez, a Cuban man from Miami, told the Herald that when he and others found themselves on a flight that had landed in Liberia in West Africa, they tried to refuse to get off the plane.

“They carried us out handcuffed, twisting the cuffs, hurting our feet and hands,” Rodriguez Lopez said. “They removed me from the plane, and then four people jumped on top of me, pinning me against the floor.” He also said they were put back on the plane after the Liberian government refused to take them.

Wait — the Trump administration is deporting migrants to strange countries overseas that haven’t even agreed to take them? Does the administration understand that these are sentient human beings?

From the Herald:

The men eventually landed in Malabo, the port city capital of Equatorial Guinea, the West African country that has been ruled by the same family dictatorship for nearly six decades. Greeting the weary deportees under cover of night was an entourage of masked officers carrying rifles, they said. Soon, they were taken in a van to a hotel, still shackled, they said, where they were confined and put under watch in mid-August.

“I feel like I’m kidnapped in the middle of Africa,” Rodriguez Lopez told the Herald in a phone interview. He said he arrived in the U.S. on a raft from Cuba in 2013. He was living in Miami with his wife and daughter before being deported 6,000 miles away to Equatorial Guinea.

This just shouldn’t be legal, y’all — not in our own country or on the international level.

Last month, “over a 10-day period, the Trump administration sent more than 100 deportees from Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua and other nations to eight countries across Africa, expanding its ‘third country’ deportation campaign,” CBS News reported. Deportees were sent to  Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, nations most of them had never set foot in, and wouldn’t know where they could go for permanent shelter and safety.

This week, we reported on the tragic story of 20-year-old Pierre Damas Bel, a Haitian immigrant living in Ohio, who walked out into traffic and allowed himself to be run over by a tractor trailer because his TPS had been revoked by the Trump administration, and he had been fitted with an ankle monitor so he could be tracked for deportation back to his country, which he fled due to extreme violence.

But at least they were going to send him back to his country, right?

It was never about making our country safer by making sure only documented immigrants resided here. It was always about racism, xenophobia, general bigotry, and a complete and utter lack of humanity towards people they have been conditioned to hate or have no regard for.

We can’t say we’re citizens of a noble nation and not stand against this.

SEE ALSO:

Report: Trump Deported Nearly 13K Non-Mexican Migrants To Mexico

Trump Admin To Resume Speedy Deportations With Minimal Due Process