Trump’s third country migrant deportations flout protections against torture or even death

An essential update, after migrants who have served prison sentences are deported to third countries without any safeguards in place regarding humane treatment - or even their survival.

A screenshot of ABC News’ coverage of a press conference at which Tricia McLaughlin, the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced the deportation of eight migrants with criminal records to South Sudan.

My new article on my website, Profound Alarm at Trump’s Deportation of Migrants to Third Countries Without Protections Against Torture or Even Death, is my definitive overview of the first six months of Trump’s “war on migrants”, with a particular focus on the administration’s recent and truly alarming drive to deport, to third countries, migrants with criminal records, who have served prison sentences, often for serious crimes.

The administration claims that it is being forced to act because these ex-prisoners’ home countries won’t take them back. However, even if this is sometimes true (and the administration is notorious for brazenly lying about every aspect of its deportation program), it is essentially an intractable political problem, to which the answer cannot, and must not be to eviscerate the post-WWII consensus — involving the Refugee Convention and the Torture Convention, and, in the US, elements of US law — that there must be robust mechanisms preventing foreign nationals from being deported, either to their home countries, or to third countries, where they face the risk of torture or even death.

In telling this story, I also examine how Trump’s declared pursuit of migrants with criminal records (roughly 4% of the 11 million undocumented migrants in the US) is a smokescreen seeking to disguise a blunter and much more violent truth — that all eleven million are a target, because entering the US illegally is being regarded as a crime worthy of deportation.

I also examine how there must always be a balance between a desire to stem uncontrolled immigration and the need for a significant number of immigrants to do numerous essential jobs, and run through the sordid back story of the administration holding Venezuelan migrants at Guantánamo, and then sending others on a one-way trip to a mega-Guantánamo in El Salvador, on the basis of allegations about their criminality that were largely exposed as lies.

I proceed to explain how this new focus on finding migrants with criminal records and sending them on a one-way trip to third countries (South Sudan and Eswatini in the last week) has been cynically implemented to forestall any sympathy for these men, to enable a program that can be effected without attracting the outrage it deserves, with its horrific echoes of the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” policies in the “war on terror”, which may well also constitute the reviled international crime of enforced disappearance.

I end with some good news, with polls showing that Americans are increasingly turning against Trumps’s excesses, although that alone is not sufficient to prevent an ever-increasing humanitarian and moral disaster without serious resistance.

If this article interests you, and you missed my previous article, As Trump Holds 72 Migrants at Guantánamo From 26 Countries Including the UK, What Is His Long-Term Plan?, please do also check it out, as it is also extremely relevant to this desperately important but mostly under-reported topic.

A live video of my song ‘O Palestine’

I’ll be providing an update soon about the almost unthinkably bleak situation in Gaza, where Israel has comfortably settled into murdering at last a hundred Palestinian civilians every day, while continuing to starve them and to cut them off from all necessary medical supplies, but in the meantime I hope you’ll enjoy the short video below, of the opening verses of my song ‘O Palestine’, recorded at a recent gig in south London with a group of new collaborators — Don on lead guitar, Bill on harmonica and Rante on bass — along with my frequent accomplice, The Wiz-Rd (my son Tyler) beatboxing.

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