Eleven million undocumented people exist in the United States. The biggest promise by the campaign that brought Trump back to the White House, was to carry out the greatest expulsion of foreigners in history. He is fulfilling this, but without bothering to respect the rights and dignity of the diaspora.
“Migrants need to have their dignity respected, need to have their rights respected, as well as asylum seekers, while also recognising, obviously, that countries have a right to control their own borders and to set their own policy, but there are standards that need to be respected”.
These were the words of Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesman for the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who called them to respect the dignity of the immigrants who have been deported from the USA as undocumented migrants, in handcuffs and chained. His position was stated before two episodes that, at the end of February, profoundly shook two governments, that of Brazil and Colombia. In the former, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded explanations from Trump’s government for what he called the “degrading treatment” of 88 citizens deported at this time, handcuffed and chained.
He then said that the Brazilian government considered it unacceptable that they were not respecting the conditions agreed with the US government.
Brazil agreed to undertake repatriation flights, since 2018, to cut the time those nationals spent in US detention centres, due to irregular migration and without the possibility of appeal.
With the flight in question, this made an emergency landing in Manaus due to technical problems, but the Brazilian authorities did not authorise the flight to continue due to the use of handcuffs and chains, the poor state of the aircraft, and in protest at the undignified treatment received by the 88 nationals on board. In the case of Colombia, President Gustavo Petro disallowed entry to the country by military planes with citizens deported from the USA, for whom he demanded dignified treatment. After this, Donald Trump threatened a rise of 25% in Colombian deportations from the United States, and added that it would rise to 50% in a week.
Fortunately, the crisis was quickly overcome. The Colombian government agreed to accept their fellow countrymen, but the agreement included receiving them in dignified conditions.
For their part, in El Salvador, the Secretary-General of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), Manuel “Chino” Flores, declared that the US policy against migrants seemed like madness.
“In the United States, there are no illegal Salvadoreans, there are undocumented ones. What Trump is doing is madness, as it is an immigrant country”, he said.
Furthermore, criticising the president of the country, Nayib Bukele’s, attitude, Flores expressed that his party opposed the country as a receiver of delinquents. “We are not anybody’s backyard, nor garbage dump… We asked for dignity, and we asked our president to demand respect”.
Pope Francis himself has spoken out, expressing his disagreement “with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal situation of some migrants with criminality”. The pope has said that “the act of deporting people who, in many cases have abandoned their own country for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and entire families”.
Such actions place those migrants “in a state of particular vulnerability and defencelessness”. “True rule of law” he said “is verified precisely by the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalised”. PL
(Translated by Donna Davison. Email: donna_davison@hotmail.com) – Photos: Pixabay
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