- Trump’s deportation list has people from virtually every nation in the world, including Africa.
- Amnesty Internation has protested inhumane treatment of deportees.
- Chains, cuffs, military planes used to ‘criminalize’ immigrants.
Thousands of people from Africa are fast joining Trump’s deportation list, one of the trending topic across all media, following a nationwide US immigration crackdown that resulted in thousands of arrests, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has reported. US president Donald Trump returned to power on a ‘Mass Deportation’ ticket and he is living up to this eerie promise.
The nearly 1000 arrests per day look overwhelming and could surpass what his predecessor, Joe Biden, carried during the last four years in office. Biden okayed 1.5 million deportations, according to figures by the Migration Policy Institute.
While Biden focused on individuals who had committed crimes, Trump is going for any and all undocumented persons. “Since taking office, Trump has carried out 21 executive actions to overhaul the US immigration system,” reports the BBC.
It quotes ICE statistics that show that over 1,000 people were removed or repatriated on just the fourth day of Trump entering the oval office. “Since taking office on 20 January, President Donald Trump has announced a flurry of immigration-related executive orders, paving the way for a widespread effort to crack down on undocumented migrants in the US,” reads the report and very importantly points out that these law changes include; “how migrants are processed and deported from the US.”
Human Rights activists are decrying the inhumane treatment of deportees, flown in military planes, cuffed and chained among other dehumanizing actions taken against them.
“The executive actions adopted by President Trump severely impact the rights of people seeking safety and place countless lives at risk, fabricating non-existing threats to expand militarization, externalization of borders, generalized use of immigration detention, expedited removals and criminalization of migrant rights defenders,” comments Ana Piquer, Americas Director at Amnesty International.
The Director at Amnesty International said; “The executive actions adopted by President Trump severely impact the rights of people seeking safety and place countless lives at risk, fabricating non-existing threats to expand militarization, externalization of borders, generalized use of immigration detention, expedited removals and criminalization of migrant rights defenders.”
Piquer said these policies make it near impossible for individuals to seek asylum in the United States and will result in thousands of people being forcibly returned to places where their lives or safety are at risk.
“President Trump is also calling for the use of criminal prosecutions for people crossing irregularly into the United States, a policy that resulted in the mass separations of families during Trump’s first term. To this day, there are families – mostly from Central America – who have still not been reunited from the first iteration of this cruel policy,” Piquer decried.
Trump’s deportation list: Who is who?
With 261,651 on Trump’s deportation list, Honduras has the greatest number of deportees thus far, next on the list is Guatemala with 253,413 and then comes Mexico with 252,044. The countries on Trump’s deportation list are from all over the rest of the world; no one is safe from Trump’s deportation list; the United Kingdom has 1,157 people on the list, UAE has Russia has 3,518 and China has, 37, 908.
Almost each and every African country is represented on the list, the top three are Ghana with 3,228, then Ethiopia with 1,713 while Senegal follows with 1,689. Other high African numbers are Sierra Leone 1,563, Guinea 1,897, then Egypt 1,461 and in East Africa, Kenya has 1,282. Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda all have numbers in the 300’s 301, 338, 393 respectively.
How are the countries on Trump’s deportation list reacting to the inhumane treatment of their citizens? Well, Colombia for one is reported to have barred two military planes that were reportedly carrying Colombian deportees from landing. “The US can’t treat Colombian migrants like criminals…they need to be treated with dignity,” the country’s president, Gustavo Petro.
Trump has also moved to expand the scope of expedited deportations of undocumented migrants, reviving a policy under his first term that Biden had discontinued.
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Five major immigration changes under Trump
Deportation of migrants: The first on the list is Mass Deportation which was a cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy that got him into office. The US defense department admits that it has provided military aircrafts to deport more than 5,000 people that have been detained by Border Patrol in San Diego and El Paso, Texas alone.
Fortifying the US-Mexico border: More than 1500 troops have been deployed to the southern US border which is in addition to some 2,500 active-duty personnel that were already there, that is a 60% increase in troops at the boarder.
Halting the processing of migrants and asylum seekers: Trump issued an executive order to suspend the entry of all undocumented migrants to the US. “Border patrol agents have been instructed to turn people away without granting them asylum hearings,” the BBC reports.
Cancelling existing migrants’ appointments: The BBC reports that; “A big change that was felt almost immediately after Trump took office is the scrapping of the CBP One smartphone app, which migrants were able to use to schedule appointments with US border patrol agents.”
Now, some 30,000 people are said to be stranded inside Mexico since the app was taken down – yet all of them had scheduled appointments that are now cancelled.
Expanding the powers of ICE and carrying out raids: Trump’s executive orders include expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) ability to arrest and detain unlawful migrants. This includes reversing a longstanding guideline that prohibited immigration raids in “sensitive” areas such as schools, hospitals and churches.