New Backgrounder on Deportations of Refugees to Cameroon
WASHINGTON – Despite the global pandemic which has slowed most international travel, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is accelerating the deportation of Black migrants to countries they fled, retaliating against those who speak out about abuses in detention. On October 13, a group of nearly 60 Cameroonian and 28 Congolese immigrants were deported despite grave concerns for their safety voiced by the immigrants themselves, their lawyers and loved ones.
Also this month, ICE executed nearly one dozen deportation flights to Haiti, which included families and young children, and is reportedly planning more deportations to Cameroon and Ethiopia.
Today, organizers and members of the Cameroonian community in the Dallas-Fort Worth area hold a press conference and car caravan outside of the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas starting at noon CDT, expressing outrage that people seeking asylum from Africa and Haiti are being abused in the United States and then summarily deported.
Some on the October 13 charter flight were Cameroonian men who are part of a formal civil rights complaint alleging violations of the use of torture to coerce deportation. The flight also included women who underwent gynecological procedures without informed consent at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia, where a whistleblower’s complaint shed light on medical abuses. Today, we are publishing a backgrounder on the recent Cameroonian deportations, and urging members of the media to follow-up on these horrific stories.
Julian Borger explains in The Guardian:
Many … Cameroonian migrants in a Mississippi detention centre refused to sign [consent to deportation], fearing death at the hands of Cameroonian government forces responsible for widespread civilian killings, and because they had asylum hearings pending.
According to multiple accounts, detainees were threatened, choked, beaten, pepper-sprayed and threatened with more violence to make them sign. Several were put in handcuffs by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, and their fingerprints were taken forcibly in place of a signature on documents called stipulated orders of removal, by which the asylum seekers waive their rights to further immigration hearings and accept deportation.
For Black immigrants, the everyday injustices in ICE detention centers and immigration courts are compounded by anti-Black racism and disparate outcomes.
One asylum-seeker deported to Cameroon said: “I want people to know I am disappointed by this nation [USA]. We were running away from a dictatorship that was killing us, to a country where we thought we would have human rights. I’ve seen no human rights in the USA. […] We breathe the same air no matter our race.”
Read the backgrounder on deportations to Cameroon: http://bit.ly/CameroonDeportation.
This coalition includes Freedom for Immigrants, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Detention Watch Network (DWN), Cameroon American Council, Haitian Bridge Alliance, Interfaith Immigration Coalition, and others.
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