What an ICE AIR plane looks like
Is the headline in TheGuardian. This is ongoing crimes against humanity by Trump to harm or kill as many as he can before he’s out of office. Asylum seekers tortured by ICE before being sent to their death.
The US is expected to fly Cameroonian asylum seekers back to their home country on Tuesday despite fears that their lives will be at risk and reports that deportees repatriated last month are now missing.
Some of the deportees are activists from the country’s anglophone minority, who face arrest warrants for their political activities from government forces with a well documented record of extrajudicial killings. They and their lawyers refer to Tuesday’s flight as the “death plane”.
snip
They expressed concern that the deportations were being rushed to clear African asylum-seekers out of the country by the end of the Trump presidency, as part of a scorched earth policy in the administration’s final weeks.
There are also reports of systematic abuse by agents of the DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), often to force the asylum seekers to sign their own deportation orders, and waive their right to pending immigration hearings. In one case, detainees were allegedly put under showers and then tasered by ICE agents, leaving some in need of hospital care.
The deportations are taking place despite a finding last year by the US government that the Cameroon government “engages in gross violations of internationally recognized human rights”. The state department deferred questions about the upcoming deportations to ICE, which did not respond to a request for comment over the weekend.
snip
‘I will be killed’
One of those due to be deported, Daniel, said his brother had been shot in 2019 by Cameroonian security services searching for him, and his father had been crippled by torture in prison. His other siblings are missing.
“I will be killed by the Cameroon government,” Daniel (a pseudonym used to protect his family) told the Guardian by telephone from Prairieland.
snip
A complaint from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Freedom for Immigrants advocacy group cited six cases of alleged abuse at the Jackson Parish Correctional Facility in Louisiana against Cameroonian detainees scheduled to be on the Tuesday deportation flight, including an inmate identified by the initials BN, who said he was stripped while his fingerprint was taken by force.
“During that time, the women officers were holding my feet. My genitals were completely naked and exposed. I was naked in front of many people – there were over 10 people there, including the women,” BN said. “I felt ashamed.”
In separate complaints, the Immigrants Rights Clinic at the Texas A&M School of Law, cited abuses at the Adams County Correctional Centre in Mississippi. An Angolan inmate identified as AC, also due to be on the Tuesday flight, said his fingerprint was taken by force and he witnessed the torture of other detainees at the prison’s solitary facility, the security housing unit (SHU).
“During his time there, he saw ICE bring African detainees to the SHU, put them in the shower, get them soaking wet, and then they use the ‘electric pistols’ (tasers) on them until they passed out,” the complaint says. “He was terrified that they would do this to him, which is why he eventually gave in when he was being physically abused and signed and gave his fingerprints.”
“We know that many of the people who are at risk of deportation have been abused in ICE custody, particularly in the jurisdiction of the New Orleans field office,” Fatma Marouf, the director of the clinic, said, adding the deportees were terrified of what awaited them after Tuesday’s flight.
There’s much more in the full article, read it! This is horrendous. Asylum seekers tortured into signing away their rights being sent to their deaths. Trump’s America can’t end soon enough.
