When the State makes a “mistake”
In March, Kilmar Ábrego García—a father, construction worker and a resident of Maryland—was deported to U.S. puppet Nayib Bukele’s CECOT prison in El Salvador where he was beaten and suffered other degradations for 160 days. Rather than just submitting to the State’s attacks against him, Kilmar filed suit. He won at each level of the federal court and the State was forced to admit that it deported Kilmar to El Salvador “by mistake.”
Deportation is not about sending people back “home”
Kilmar fighting back must have embarrassed the State, because after he was released from Putnam County Jail following his return to the U.S., he is again in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) custody for new charges. Now, the State has forced him to choose between pleading guilty and being deported to Costa Rica, where he’s promised he will be safe and free, or be deported to Uganda, where he might not be safe or free if he pleads not guilty and where he doesn’t speak the languages, according to his lawyer.
This is revealing, because in the past few decades, the U.S. has justified deportation as sending people back “home.” It has tried to present itself as generous by returning Mexicans to Mexico, Hondurans to Honduras and Haitians to Haiti.
But many of our people from Haiti ended up imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. A man from Congo was deported to South Sudan, and then the visas for all of our people from South Sudan were revoked.
So the colonial State uses deportations as coercion not only against individuals but entire communities. Now the U.S. reveals it doesn’t intend to limit deportation to within the same continent as the person’s origin or a nearby island.
Isolating the White House and DOJ
Even members of the State are divided on the very public assault on Kilmar’s rights. U.S. congressman Glenn Ivey says the Trump administration came up with the charges to salvage its reputation after wrongfully deporting Kilmar to El Salvador. The former chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville says he resigned because he believes that the prosecution against Kilmar is politically motivated.
Even though it was determined that he was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, the reactionaries still call him an MS-13 gang member and human trafficker, among other accusations. He has filed a motion to dismiss in Tennessee based on selective and vindictive prosecution. A federal judge has blocked Kilmar from being moved outside the continental U.S. as well as more than 200 miles from the courthouse, so that he can attend his next habeas corpus hearing on October 6. His lawyers have moved to put a stop to the White House and DHS campaign to malign Kilmar further before his trial.
Deportation started when Europe invaded Africa
Europe has a long history of forcibly removing Africans and Indigenous people from our home and sending us far away from our homes. It first started during colonial slavery when millions of Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic to Turtle Island/Atzlan.
After brutally crushing an uprising of Africans on a plantation in Virginia, colonizer rapist Thomas Jefferson and colonizer James Monroe debated on where to send the surviving Africans on the plantation. They decided against sending our people to Haiti, Brazil or the Philippines for fear that we would regroup and destroy the plantation.
So they sent our people to the western coast of Africa, to the area which became the State of Liberia. This was not in the interest of repatriating us, but to start aggression on the local African communities in order to open up new territory for the colonizer, so the North American colonizers could compete with European colonizers who had taken over much of the rest of Africa, the homeland of all Africans.
The U.S., which is an illegitimate settler-colonial State, during the administration of colonizer Andrew Jackson, gathered Indigenous people, to whom Turtle Island belongs, in large numbers to be removed from their traditional territories to reservations—which Chairman Omali Yeshitela defines as concentration camps—to make room for white settler-colonizers from Europe. This forced removal was called the Trail of Tears.
After the Mexican Repatriation Act, Mexicans born mostly in territories in the U.S. that had only recently been stolen from Mexico like California, Texas and Colorado were deported. The Navajo people have reported being detained by I.C.E. Indigenous people with tribal citizenship have been sent to Mexico even though they speak neither Spanish nor English. This was even before the Trump administration.
Demographic threat is insurgent
This pattern is yet another indication that the very presence of Africans and Indigenous in, not just within current U.S. borders, but on the whole continent, threatens the U.S. itself. Just like when the U.S. sent our people far away from the U.S. to prevent our regrouping after rising up against the colonial slavemaster, the U.S. wants to send Kilmar and others far away from Turtle Island/Atzlan to prevent the regrouping of oppressed populations. Their threat to send him to a region where he has no known family or community is a judicial banishment.
The goal is not recognition of rights but liberation
The oppressor has long seen colonized people as objects to be moved for its well-being, not ours, and has destabilized our communities, our families and ourselves. Only by organizing with the goal to win our liberation, through the destruction of colonialism, will we be free of colonial borders, where Africa will be free and the stolen land called America returned to its original owners, the Indigenous people of Turtle Island/Atzlan. Only then will all human beings be free to be just people, no one oppressing another.
The Uhuru Movement fights every day to achieve this! Join the movement which is right now solving the problems of our people on the ground!
Hasta la victoria siempre!
Victory to African and indigenous people!
Join the Uhuru Movement!
Uhuru!
