Affected individuals and advocates have in recent days renewed calls for the Biden administration to protect thousands of Cameroonian immigrants from deportation and imminent harm. While lawmakers led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Karen Bass urged the implementation of temporary protections last November, Cameroonians have not yet been able to access critical relief. Without protections, they risk being deported to imminent danger.
“Multiple humanitarian crises involving terrorist group Boko Haram, government forces, and armed non-state groups have caused widespread violence and human rights violations against Cameroonians, causing immense loss of life, incalculable human suffering, and displacement,” FWD.us said in a recent post.
The immigration reform advocacy group said that failing to designate 18-month Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) for Cameroon “would have devastating human consequences for Cameroonians currently living in the U.S.”
A recent report from Human Rights Watch shines an important light on these devastating human consequences, finding that dozens of Cameroonian asylum-seekers deported from 2019 to January 2021 faced abuses ranging from arbitrary arrest, extortion, and rape following their return. The report also included disturbing allegations that asylum-seekers’ confidential information was shared with Cameroonian officials.
“The Biden administration took the positive step of canceling a Feb. 2021 deportation flight to Cameroon,” the human rights group said. “However, it deported several Cameroonians in October 2021 and has failed to designate Temporary Protected Status for Cameroon, despite conditions making return unsafe.”
FWD.us says that extending temporary relief such as TPS or DED to an estimated 40,000 Cameroonians currently in the U.S. ”would allow them to remain safe and together with their families in their communities.”
The federal government “may designate a foreign country for TPS due to conditions in the country that temporarily prevent the country's nationals from returning safely,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said. “Although DED is not a specific immigration status, individuals covered by DED are not subject to removal from the United States for a designated period of time,” the agency said.
Van Hollen, Bass, and more than 50 other lawmakers in their November letter to President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas noted that the State Department “identified a troubling catalogue of human rights abuses” against Cameroonian nationals, “including extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary detention, violence against women and children, and targeted attacks against members of the LGBTQ+ community.”
Like the human rights report notes, these abuses have extended to asylum-seekers deported there by U.S. officials. One woman detained by the military following her October 2020 deportation described nearly daily beatings. “They hit me all over my body,” she said in the report. “They said that I’ve destroyed the image of Cameroon ... so I had to pay for it.”
“Given that the devastating human consequences of these humanitarian crises in Cameroon have escalated in recent months, this protection is urgently needed now more than ever,” lawmakers said in the November letter.
Daniel Tse, founding member of the Cameroon Advocacy Network, has been among the voices pointing to the human rights report and urging the Biden administration to act, as well as correct injustices against deported asylum-seekers.
“This campaign, this report, is about bringing them back and exposing the harm these unjustly deported individuals have faced. We want the administration to see that this is unjust and they must respect the fundamental principle of non-refoulement, including non-return to a real risk of persecution, arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, or other cruel, inhuman conditions as exposed in this report.”
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