HV Detention Watch #11

Note: The articles linked to below are long and go in depth into the personalities and revisions of U.S. policy and agencies. They are worth reading. You may encounter a paywall for the Post story.

On 21 September the Washington Post and the Guardian published lengthy, damning articles on the mostly secret revamping of government agencies —originally created to help immigrants and refugees—into an elaborate, expensive, and cruel system of expulsion. Both publications cited the Deportation Project, an investigation into third country removals conducted over six months by 26 media organization in 15 countries, organized by Forbidden Stories, a nonprofit news organization based in Paris.

“How Trump turned a refugee bureau into a $410 million deportation operation” was the Post’s headline. “The Office of Remigration—a division of about 15 employees in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM)—marks an extraordinary break in U.S. foreign policy, inverting the nation’s long-standing commitment to resettling refugees in need into an intensive focus on expelling them from the country,” the Post wrote. At the center of the new deportation system is the State Department.

“Civil servants who spent their careers in humanitarian efforts are now tasked with helping the administration cajole countries into accepting migrants from around the world with little regard for the treatment they will leave once they depart the U.S.” Cajoling involves millions of dollars to the receiving countries, and even to two U.N. agencies—the International Organization for Migration and the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

The U.S. under Trump has drastically cut funds to those agencies, whose mission is to help people who’ve been forced to flee their homes, but is now paying them to assist deportees from the U.S. The agreements have been secured under orders of Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff. He has pushed “key appointments at the State Department that have allowed him to overrule other foreign policy objectives in his goal of achieving more deportations.”

Deals with many of the countries are written through contracts designed to bypass statutory requirements, including human rights safeguards, the Post reported. “The whole point was to circumvent (Congressional) notification that money was being sent to governments known to  be corrupt,” one former State Dept. official told the Post.

The State Dept. also severed contracts with U.S. resettlement groups and reappropriated $250 million from refugee aid programs to help finance “Project Homecoming,” a Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) program aimed at getting immigrants to voluntarily leave the U.S. Some third countries are forcing deportees from the U.S. back to the countries they originally fled, a process known as “refoulement,” that violates international refugee treaties.

A federal appeals court last week ruled the policy unlawful—as deportees were denied sufficient notice and the chance to raise fear-based claims against specific countries. The Trump administration is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court. The State Dept. said the U.S. government would use “all legal means to remove those with no right to remain in our country.” The administration has deported more than 25,000 people to some 28 countries–20,000 of them to Mexico. DHS says it has deported 985,000 people in Trump’s second term.

While the government maintains that those it deports are criminals, most of the 35 countries that signed deals with the U.S. have said they will not accept anyone with a record of violent crimes, the Guardian reported. “The people forced onto planes include those who spent most of their lives in the U.S., parents detained on a school run and the adult children of elderly relatives who depend upon them for care.”

The Guardian described the plight of an Iranian dissident, 32, expelled to the Central African Republic (CAR). She had fled Iran 18 months ago and then spent one year in a U.S. detention center. Two weeks after a judge freed her with legal protections, DHS rearrested her and flew her to the CAR, a country the State Dept. deems too dangerous for Americans to visit.