Washington DC - In response to a new appalling report that immigrants who were sent to Djibouti by the Trump regime are now stranded in shipping containers and facing life-threatening conditions, Setareh Ghandehari, Advocacy Director of Detention Watch Network issued the following statement:
“We are in a crisis of conscience. The use of shipping containers to detain people is heinous and enraging - and coupled with the extreme heat, disease, and threats of rocket attacks in Djibouti, can be deadly. This is the latest move in Trump’s shocking expansion of third country deportations, when a person is deported to a country other than their country of origin, where they often have no connection. By expelling people out of sight and out of mind to remote prisons and war-torn, unstable countries, the Trump regime is attempting to normalize the offshoring of immigration detention and third country deportations as a new and expanded model of incarceration and deportation.
Let me be clear, this is a tool of propaganda to dehumanize and villainize people while carrying out Trump’s mass detention and deportation agenda unchecked. These cruel policies do not make our communities safer; rather, Trump is disappearing and exiling people as a part of his unrelenting pursuit of terrorizing and demonizing migrants and immigrants, completely disregarding people's well-being and humanity. He is doing this with little to no details or oversight, and in defiance of court orders — all the while people languish in limbo.
This moment demands a national outcry — people’s lives are at risk. None of us can remain silent on Trump’s excessive cruelty and our elected leaders must vocally oppose this mass detention and deportation agenda by denying Trump the resources he needs to carry out his plans, including by cutting funds to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”
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Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.