By Andy Worthington | read the original article here
25,000 migrants have been sent to 28 countries worldwide with which they have no connection, primarily to cynically sidestep judicial rulings preventing their repatriation
A screenshot from Channel 4 News’ recent report about the Trump administration’s third country deportation program, featuring Carlos, a Venezuelan migrant sent from the US to Liberia, despite a US judge having issued a withholding order preventing his deportation.
My new article on my website, In Liberia, the Horrors of Trump’s Third Country Migrant Deportation Program Are Shockingly Exposed, is my report about the shocking expansion of the Trump administration’s migrant deportation program to third countries, following up on a recent Channel 4 News broadcast from Liberia, featuring three migrants, from Brazil, Honduras and Venezuela, who are amongst 14 recently deported migrants, none of whom have any connection to the west African country.
One, Carlos, told the presenter, Jamal Osman, that he was torn away from his family without any notification, and despite a withholding order from a US judge preventing his return to Venezuela.
Though undertaken in Trump’s name, the mass deportation is, as I describe it, “overseen and tightly controlled by Stephen Miller, Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, who, it is fair to say, is nothing less than a modern-day Nazi, obsessed with, and driving with fanatical enthusiasm his plans for the mass ethnic cleansing of the United States.”
I wrote about Miller’s profoundly baleful, racist influence on the US in an article in February, entitled, An Ever-Expanding Gulag of Concentration Camps for Immigrants: The US Under Stephen Miller.
When I first focused on third country deportations last summer, the Trump administration was seeking to make it palatable by focusing on the deportations of individuals with criminal records, but just as those lies about the deportation program in general have dissolved on contact with reality, so too the third country deportation policy has morphed into an unconscionable program of sending migrants on a one-way trip to far-flung countries with which they have no connection, solely on the basis that legal obstacles had been raised preventing them from being sent home.
According to research by the admirable Third Country Deportation Watch, established by Refugees International and Human Rights First, around 25,000 migrants have been deported to 28 countries around the world with which they have no connection — in Europe, Asia, Africa and Central and South America. 80% of them have been deported by land to Mexico, but the other 5,000 have been flown, at vast expense, to be dumped in countries with whom the US has undertaken secretive deals, and with, crucially, no guarantee that any of these blameless migrants will be treated humanely or looked after in the long term.
As has been the case since the third country deportation program began last year, the Trump administration has, as I describe it, “sought assiduously to avoid questions about whether or not these deportations involve an arrogantly dismissive contempt for the principle of non-refoulement — the obligation on nation states to not deport anyone to any country in which their ‘life or freedom would be threatened’ — which is enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1984 Torture Convention, and is also enshrined in US law.”
Judges have been pushing back against this outrageous policy since last March, most notably via District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston. Just last week, an appeals court upheld Judge Murphy’s latest ruling, that the deportations violate due process because they fail to give the migrants any notice about the decisions to deport them, or the opportunity to legally contest it, but it is expected that the administration will appeal to the Supreme Court.
As I explain in my conclusion, “The struggle for justice continues”, but in the meantime the thousands of migrants sent to third countries without any form of due process “continue to suffer from the unconscionable effects of what, at its heart, is a kind of ‘extraordinary rendition’ policy engineered by the US government under Stephen Miller, whose horrors are so monstrously racist and indiscriminate that they almost defy comprehension.”
Read the whole article here, and watch the Channel 4 News feature below:
Please also read my Substack Notes
Just a reminder that, in between posts, I regularly post Notes here on Substack, which you can find here. The two-week delay since my last post to you is because I took a week’s holiday to try to preserve my strength and my sanity.
While away, however, I marked the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, posted a photo of Guantánamo campaigners outside the White House on September 11, and shared Macklemore’s powerful words after he was removed from Ed Sheeran’s tour for declaring, “Free Palestine.”
Since my return, I’ve posted about the welcome collapse of the shamefully cynical rigged trial of London student Sarah Cotte, shared the Irish writer Colin Sheridan’s powerful list of the items banned from Gaza by Israel, updated the numbers of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel’s jails, and marked the start of the third trial in London of the Filton 25 anti-genocide activists.
I also put a shout out for the three albums of original protest music by my band The Four Fathers, marking 9/11 and the anniversaries of the release of two of the three albums. You can check them out here, here and here.
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