Is dumping a Cuban person in Africa ‘deportation’?

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — About two weeks ago, US authorities took Cubans, Venezuelans and other Latin Americans from detention centers and placed them on a flight to Liberia. When they landed, having spent the entire flight in shackles, some of the men refused to get off the plane, according to the Miami Herald. They had no ties to the African continent, let alone Liberia.

Reuters reported that authorities told the captives who refused to leave the plane that they would be taken back to the US, but proceeded to fly them to Equatorial Guinea, one of the world’s longest-standing dictatorships with a bleak human rights record. There, the Herald reported, they were taken to a hotel and confined, with no idea about when or how they might leave.

This incident, one of many such transfers that have occurred under the Trump administration, was described in news reports as a “deportation.”

As President Donald Trump and his administration seek to force immigrants out of the country en masse, the government has found that some countries are refusing to take back their citizens. So the administration has devised a workaround to try to get closer to Trump’s goal of deporting a million people a year: putting undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers on airplanes and delivering them to faraway countries to which they have no ties.

For more than a century, the vast majority of people removed from the US have been sent back to their country of origin or to the country from which they entered, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. This is generally how the public understands the concept of deportation.

But the Trump administration is going several steps further, sending people to unfamiliar countries where they face further confinement, sometimes indefinitely. In these instances, they are not free to start a new life; rather, they continue to be punished for ever having come to the US at all.

The realities are so harrowing that some immigration advocates argue the word “deportation” fails to capture the gravity of the situation.

“‘Deportation’ is an understatement because deportation doesn’t fully express the randomness and the cruelty and the danger that comes with third-country deportations,” said Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA.

Anna O. Law, an immigration historian and professor at Brooklyn College, said that the lack of adequate vocabulary is severely hampering public understanding of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. “The common understanding of what deportation means doesn’t always comport with what is actually happening to people,” she said. “And it’s underplaying the severity of the situation and the rights violations.”

The word “deportation,” derived from the Latin “dēportāre,” meaning to carry off, convey away or transport, was recorded in English as far back as 1595. In the US, the act of deporting noncitizens seems to predate the use of the word by about a century. The Alien Acts of 1798, which Trump has invoked in his effort to oust migrants, granted the president powers to expel foreigners, though they used words such as “depart” and “remove.”

By 1893, the word “deportation” had entered legal parlance. It appeared several times in the Supreme Court’s decision on Fong Yue Ting v. the United States, which challenged a law that extended the Chinese Exclusion Act. It also appeared in the Immigration Act of 1907, which restricted the kinds of immigrants that were allowed into the US.

For a time, the US used both “exclusion” and “deportation” to describe the act of removing someone from the country, said Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer and senior fellow for the Migration Policy Institute. “Exclusion” referred to people who arrived at a port of entry and were deemed inadmissible, and “deportation” referred to people who were already in the country and were ordered removed (“exclude” and “deport” both appear in the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965). In 1996, according to Chishti, “deportation” and “exclusion” were combined into “removal,” which remains the official term.

“Deportation” continues to be used colloquially, though.

Though sending people to countries other than where they are from, a practice known as “third-country removal” or “third-country deportations,” is not new, Reichlin-Melnick said it was rarely used until recent years — he noted the shift began with Joe Biden’s administration, which returned non-Mexican migrants who entered at the southern US border back to Mexico at a larger scale than before. The Trump administration has ramped up the practice even further, entering into agreements with countries in Africa, Central Asia and Latin America to accept people that it wants out of the US, often in exchange for funding or other favors.

“For the United States now to begin sending thousands of people to countries that are not their own, even though they come with the term ‘removal’ written into the law, it does suggest that it’s something different,” Reichlin-Melnick added.

A removal order typically specifies what country the person is being deported to, Reichlin-Melnick explained. If a person cannot be returned to their country of origin or the country from which they entered, he said the law indicates that the person being removed can designate which country they want to be sent to — this could be a country where they hold dual citizenship, a country where they were born or a country that had sovereignty over the home country when they were born. The law stipulates that if it is “impractical, inadvisable, or impossible” to send the person to one of those countries, then the US government can send the person to another country that will accept them.

While this means the government can legally send a person to a third country of its choosing, Reichlin-Melnick said this provision of the law is intended as an exception, to be used when all other countries a person could be sent to have been ruled out. But the Trump administration, Reichlin-Melnick said, is weaponizing this exception and treating it as the rule.

And even when the US government designates the country a person is sent to, it must still comply with certain rules. Under international and domestic law, Chishti said, the US cannot send a person to a country where they will face persecution or torture, a principle known as non-refoulement. It is also illegal to send an asylum seeker or refugee to a third country that will subsequently deport them to their home country, where they risk persecution or torture, a process known as chain refoulement.

For years, Fischer said that human rights experts understood refoulement to mean returning refugees and asylum seekers to the countries they had come from. And while reporting from The Washington Post and The New York Times has indicated that some officials who have agreed to accept migrants from the US intend to send them back to their home countries, she said that migrants are at risk of human rights violations even in countries other than the ones they originally fled.

The Department of Homeland Security referred questions about third-country agreements to the State Department, which did not respond to a request for comment. But the Trump administration has previously said that its third-country agreements guarantee due process, and that the third countries are providing “diplomatic assurances” that the migrants won’t be persecuted or tortured.

As advocates have noted, however, many migrants aren’t given a proper hearing and receive as little as a day’s notice before they are sent to a distant country, where they are detained upon arrival. Without papers or cellphones, they have no access to basic means of living. The poor human rights records of the countries that agreed to accept them are further cause for alarm.

“That is a level of officially sanctioned cruelty that really no administration in the modern era has engaged in,” Reichlin-Melnick said, “and really exemplifies the need for Congress to step in and do something.”

Is there a better word than “deportation” to describe the Trump administration’s campaign of sending people to countries where they have never been, where they don’t know anyone or speak the language and where they might face human rights violations?

Law said she didn’t have language for such circumstances. Fischer said “intentional cruelty” and “chaos” were what came to mind. Elsewhere, some scholars and immigration experts have compared certain third-country removals to “extraordinary rendition,” a term for when authorities bypass the process of extradition and transfer criminal suspects to jurisdictions with lower human rights standards.

In an interview with Tampa Bay Times reporter Juan Carlos Chavez, one Cuban immigrant who was living in Florida and spent months in detention before he was sent to Africa had another word for what was done to him: He called it a “kidnapping.”

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