An LA Times investigation has uncovered attacks on Black and African asylum seekers who came to the U.S. fearing for their lives. What they found is a government that is systematically committing what one journalist, MSNBC’s Joy Reid, is calling “crimes against humanity.”
“As Trump leaves office, the ‘pattern and practice of physical and verbal coercion’ by ICE officers and guards to try and force Black asylum seekers to sign deportation papers is worsening, according to the complaints filed to the Homeland Security’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and Inspector General’s offices,” The Times reports.
“Beyond threats, the tactics include shackling the immigrants, stripping them naked, holding them down and choking them, resulting in injuries, according to the complaints. Officials often committed the assaults out of sight of facility cameras, or, in several instances, filmed the assaults themselves, the complaints state.”
The asylum seekers are not criminals. They “include teachers, law students, mothers, fathers, a 2-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl, who have fled corrupt governments, political persecution, gang rape, torture by security forces, assassination attempts and arbitrary detention.”
Here’s just one of the many horrifying accounts the LA Times published.
“K.S., a 34-year-old from Cameroon, said he fled because government officials asked him to work with them to capture Anglophone people. He refused,” the Times reports.
An ICE deportation officer advised him to sign papers agreeing to be deported back to Cameroon, the country he was fleeing. If Cameroon didn’t agree to take him back then he would be released to his U.S. sponsor, ICE told him.
After 97 days he was ordered to pack up his belongings.
“ICE officers put him on a flight to Louisiana that picked up other Cameroonian deportees and then dropped the group off at the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas. On Oct. 13, K.S. said, he was cuffed again and taken to the airport, where he boarded a flight with about 100 other African migrants.”
He watched as ICE officers strapped in three men from their shoulders to their ankles to restrict their movement and covered their heads with bags. The officers then laid the men, immovable in the mats, across the plane rows.
Reid tweeted, “these sound like descriptions of how Africans were bound and tossed like kindling on slave ships.”
“We are now the global monster,” she adds.
Read the entire report here.
Jetta Disco image by US CBP via Flickr