By ATIA TILARIOUS AZOHNWI
The Honourable Chad f. Wolf, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has been urged to block the deportation of Cameroonian asylum-seekers until violence ebbs away in the North West and South West Regions.
The plea is contained in an October 28 dispatch signed by four United States Senators: Chris Van Hollen, Christopher A. Coons, Edward J. Markey, and Benjamin L. Cardin.
The lawmakers say those being deported by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will find themselves in grave danger back home in Cameroon.
“In recent weeks, our offices have seen an increase in reports of ICE deporting Cameroonian asylum-seekers. We are concerned by this trend, as the ongoing human rights abuses in the Anglophone Regions of Cameroon place deported individuals in grave danger,” said the U.S. Senators. We urge you to halt the deportation of Cameroonian asylum-seekers until, at the very least, the violence has abated. We further request that no such detainee be removed if they have pending legal motions.”
Roughly 700,000 people have been displaced and several thousand have been killed since the conflict in Cameroon began, with over 3.9 million currently in need of humanitarian support, the Senators wrote in their letter.
“ICE detainees returned to Cameroon face a high risk of being detained, beaten, disappeared, tortured, or possibly even killed,” they said.
The quartet of Senators say the United States has a moral obligation not to turn its back on civilians fleeing from conflict.
“These individuals are targets for both government forces and armed separatist groups. Allowing their deportation under these circumstances would place their lives at risk,” the senators informed Secretary Wolf. “We urge you to halt the deportation of Cameroonian asylum-seekers and look forward to your prompt response.”
The recent move by the Trump administration to deport Cameroonian asylum-seekers comes despite allegations that an earlier set of deportees have gone missing since being repatriated.
The US is expected to fly Cameroonian asylum seekers back home on Tuesday, November 17, despite fears that their lives will be at risk and allegations that some deportees repatriated last month are now missing.
Lawyers, human rights groups and Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen insists that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt deportation flights to Cameroon while political violence is still widespread there and while at least some of the detainees have cases pending or motions to reopen cases before the Board of Immigration Appeals.
They expressed concern that the deportations were being rushed to clear African asylum-seekers out of the country by the end of the Trump presidency, as part of a scorched earth policy in the administration’s final weeks.
There are also allegations of systematic abuse by agents of the DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), often to force the asylum seekers to sign their own deportation orders, and waive their right to pending immigration hearings. In one case, detainees were allegedly put under showers and then tasered by ICE agents, leaving some in need of hospital care, said The Guardian.
The deportations are taking place despite a finding last year by the US government that the Cameroon government “engages in gross violations of internationally recognized human rights”. The state department is said to have deferred questions about the upcoming deportations to ICE.
“Due to operational security, we are only able to confirm removal flights once they have landed in the designated country,” an ICE spokeswomanis quoted as saying.
“The immigration laws of the United States allow an alien to pursue relief from removal; however, once they have exhausted all due process and appeals, they remain subject to a final order of removal issued by the agency, an immigration judge or the Board of Immigration Appeals, and that order must be carried out.”
However, according to their lawyers, seven of those due to be on the plane had current motions to reopen appeals and one had a case pending before the immigration appeals board. Advocates argue that legal outcomes for asylum seekers are a lottery. Nationwide, 80% of applications from Cameroonians are successful, but certain judges have records of rejecting over 90% Cameroonian asylum cases.
About 38 men and 10 women are scheduled to be on Tuesday’s flight, 37 of them Cameroonian, but also six Angolan and three Congolese asylum seekers. In recent days they have been moved from prisons across the south to Prairieland Detention Centre in Alvarado, Texas, in preparation for a charter flight out of Fort Worth.
Van Hollen, Democratic senator for Maryland, wrote to the acting DHS director Chad Wolf, on 6 November pointing out that violence in Cameroon is escalating.
“It’s obviously alarming that they would schedule these flights given the violence in Cameroon, and the very high risk that anybody deported to Cameroon would become the victim of violence,” he told the Guardian.
“We are bringing this to their [DHS’s] attention so they are not going to be able to plead ignorance.”
The senator said his letter to the DHS director that many of the 57 Cameroonians deported on an ICE flight on 13 October, “now live in hiding for fear for their lives, or have not been heard of since leaving the US.”
According to a news report from Cameroon, the returnees were detained by government security forces after their flight arrived in Douala and their whereabouts are now unknown. Lawyers and family members told the Guardian that at least two deportees had bribed their way out of detention and had gone into hiding.
Torture allegations
Human rights organisations allege that in ICE prisons, some of the detainees were tortured into signing, or putting their fingerprint on, their detention orders.
A complaint from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Freedom for Immigrants advocacy group cited six cases of alleged abuse at the Jackson Parish Correctional Facility in Louisiana against Cameroonian detainees scheduled to be on the Tuesday deportation flight, including an inmate identified by the initials BN, who said he was stripped while his fingerprint was taken by force.
“During that time, the women officers were holding my feet. My genitals were completely naked and exposed. I was naked in front of many people – there were over 10 people there, including the women,” BN said. “I felt ashamed.”
In separate complaints, the Immigrants Rights Clinic at the Texas A&M School of Law, cited alleged abuses at the Adams County Correctional Centre in Mississippi. An Angolan inmate identified as AC, also due to be on the Tuesday flight, said his fingerprint was taken by force and he witnessed the torture of other detainees at the prison’s solitary facility, the security housing unit (SHU).
“During his time there, he saw ICE bring African detainees to the SHU, put them in the shower, get them soaking wet, and then they use the ‘electric pistols’ (tasers) on them until they passed out,” the complaint says. “He was terrified that they would do this to him, which is why he eventually gave in when he was being physically abused and signed and gave his fingerprints.”
“We know that many of the people who are at risk of deportation have been abused in ICE custody, particularly in the jurisdiction of the New Orleans field office,” FatmaMarouf, the director of the clinic, said, adding the deportees were terrified of what awaited them after Tuesday’s flight.
“I think the risk to the Cameroonians is very serious,” Marouf said. “Many of them were beaten by the military before as they were part of separatist movements. Some of them were leaders in their communities. I think they really do fear for their lives going back.”
Immigrant rights organisations say there has been a rush in recent weeks to deport African asylum seekers in particular.
“This is consistent with the way the Trump administration is trying to rush many decisions in these closing weeks of the administration,” Van Hollen said, pointing to eleventh-hour steps to erase environmental regulations, and politicise the civil service. “What we’re seeing from the Trump administration in their dying hours is a rush to do as much damage as possible.”