Extraordinary Rendition: Immigration Edition
We tortured some folks.
When I saw the AP headline “More than half of Latin Americans deported from US to Congo are now back home,” I thought something good had happened. Alas, not so much.
More than half of the 15 Latin Americans deported in April to Congo under the Trump administration’s widely criticized crackdown on migrants have returned to their countries of origin, the Congolese government and one of their lawyers said Friday.
U.S. immigration judges have ruled they were likely to face persecution back home.
Congo is one of at least eight African nations with which the U.S. has struck third-country deportation deals.
Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to nearly two dozen countries that are not their own, advocates say. Immigration lawyers said the administration uses deportations to third countries as a legal loophole to indirectly force asylum seekers back to their home countries.
Alma David, a U.S.-based attorney representing one of the 15 migrants, said eight deportees have returned to their home countries in recent weeks.
Granting that the number here is small, this is quite troubling. Judges have ruled that these individuals are eligible for asylum in the United States because they faced a risk of persecution in their home countries. So we instead deport them to Congo? Where, apparently, it’s so bad that they’d rather take their chances back home.
Four Peruvians and three Colombians returned home earlier this week, assisted by the International Organization for Migration, a U.N.-affiliated agency, David said.
They returned via the IOM’s Assisted Voluntary Return program, in which the IOM covers travel costs and logistics for migrants who consent to go back to their home countries, as an alternative to forced deportation.
The lawyer said the migrants had been granted protections against removal to their home country by U.S. federal courts, which ruled they were likely to face persecution if they returned.
“The fact that they chose to return there anyway raises serious concerns that they likely felt backed into a corner because no viable alternative was presented to them,” David said.
The IOM has said assisted voluntary returns are “strictly voluntary and based on free, prior and informed consent.”
A Colombian man returned to his home country on his own in recent days, David said.
“These developments confirm the strictly transitional, temporary, and time-limited nature of this mechanism, as announced from its launch,” the Congolese government said in the statement. “Further departures will take place shortly as part of the implementation of the arrangement.”
And, apparently, it’s not just Congo.
The announcement comes on the same day as rights lawyers filed a case against Equatorial Guinea before Africa’s top human rights body, accusing the central African nation of forcing deportees from the U.S. back to their home countries in violation of their rights.
This is reminiscent of the shameful practice euphemistically called “extraordinary rendition” during the so-called Global War on Terror. Began under the Clinton administration, greatly expanded under the Bush administration, and continued well into the Obama administration despite Obama’s Executive Order prohibiting the practice, those suspected of terrorism were sent to countries with autocratic regimes to be interrogated, often under torture. While illegal under international law, including treaties to which the United States is a signatory, and numerous U.S. laws, it ostensibly gave plausible deniability.
While odious, it was at least under the guise of national security. Al Qaeda had murdered a significant number of Americans even before 9/11, and it was easy to rationalize extraordinary means. As Obama put it at the program’s end,
People did not know whether more attacks were imminent. And there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.
It’s much harder to justify in the case of those who are simply in the United States illegally. Even if they have been convicted of violent crimes, we have the means to detain them under due process.
It turns out we are the baddies.
There is a general pattern of treating these people as if they are something far less than people. It makes you wonder what is happening in the ICE facilities where they aren’t letting anyone from local health departments in to inspect.