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As the Trump administration looks to expand its dubious plans to deport immigrants to foreign lands, they’re apparently looking to war-torn countries with poor human rights records to essentially serve as deterrents for future immigrants.
Having already sent nearly 300 immigrants — who’ve been framed as hardened criminals despite many of them appearing to have no criminal record whatsoever — to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison, the administration is planning to expand its deportations to Libya, NBC News reported. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that imminent deportation flights to Libya, or any other third country, without due process would violate his temporary restraining order.
It’s noteworthy that top Libyan officials denied that any arrangement is in place to accept immigrants from the United States, though the country’s provisional government suggested that “some parallel parties that are not subject to legitimacy” could be involved.
At the moment, Libya is effectively divided into two factions that are fighting for control of the country, which has been wrought by war and strife after the U.S.-backed coup that dislodged Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Libya’s treatment of immigrants has been decried by human rights activists, and, given the dehumanizing things Trump has said to malign immigrants — such as his claim that they are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. — it’s fair to wonder whether the administration sees Libya’s brutality as a benefit in this case.
And the same goes for Rwanda, whose foreign minister recently confirmed that his government was in “early talks” with the Trump administration about accepting immigrants. As multiple critics of such a deal recently explained to NPR, Rwanda is also plagued by human rights abuses:
Even without the expense, critics say Rwanda’s abysmal rights record under President Paul Kagame means it’s no place to resettle people.
“Rwanda under the long-ruling Kagame dictatorship is simply not a safe country, it’s a totalitarian police state by any standard,” said Jeffrey Smith, founder of pro-democracy nonprofit Vanguard Africa.
Michela Wrong, a journalist and author of a book on Rwanda, also said the country is not a suitable place to send deportees.
“This is a country where the elections are routinely rigged, where opposition activists disappear and are found murdered…where opposition leaders aren’t allowed to run in the elections, journalists are jailed or end up fleeing the country,” she said.
The Trump administration could easily look to Britain — which previously attempted a deportation arrangement with Rwanda that has widely been considered an expensive failure — for reasons why this might be a bad idea. But the administration’s multimillion-dollar prison deal with El Salvador already proves that it’s willing to waste money on cruel stunts.
But the administration’s multimillion-dollar prison deal with El Salvador already proves that it’s willing to waste money on cruel stunts.
It’s worth noting that Trump doesn’t appear to carry high regard for African nations. As you may remember, he labeled them as “shithole countries,” along with El Salvador and Haiti, during an Oval Office meeting back in 2018. He has offered no mea culpa for those bigoted remarks, so the fact he essentially wants to dump immigrants in these same places — and potentially even U.S. citizens — suggests he is seeking to punish his party’s perceived enemies and effectively threatening anyone who might defy his warped, authoritarian perception of law and order.
It certainly seems to set up a perverse reward structure for other countries. Why shore up your human rights abuses to get on America’s good side — as countries have historically had to do — when you can just tailor your brutality so it aligns with the Trump administration’s mission?