Washington, DC — Yesterday, despite a federal court order, the Trump administration deported at least two people to war-torn South Sudan, in an alarming rise of third country deportations. Stacy Suh, Program Director of Detention Watch Network, issued the following statement:
“The Trump regime is leveraging its diplomatic ties and strong arming leaders to expand third country deportations, when a person is deported to a country other than their country of origin, where they often have no connection. Third country expulsions are an expanded and alarming brand of deportation reached through quid pro quo deals that are shrouded in secrecy. At times as these back-door deals materialize, the administration is putting out feelers for offshore detention agreements on a parallel track. It is particularly dangerous when the two tracks of offshoring detention and third party deportations intersect, like Trump’s agreement with El Salvador. With these pathwork agreements, the administration is putting people’s lives at risk by obscuring transparency, cutting people off from their support networks, denying them due process, and subjecting them to brutal conditions, at times indefinitely.
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.”
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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.