The secretive, cruel and often illegally enacted deportation deals between the US and third party countries revealed

Anyone who doubts the abject cruelty and in some cases lawlessness of the US' immigration policy under the current administration should have a read of the recent Guardian article “Banished to alien lands: Trump’s secret deportation deals”.

The story of Nika’s experience of the system contains some particular representative lowlights:

No one would tell the shackled detainees onboard the US immigration plane where they were going. The officers in charge would taunt them when they asked, they said. It was only when the seat-back video screens finally showed a map that the 18 migrants worked it out.

Their destination was Central African Republic (CAR), a country few of them had even heard of.

Nika, a 32-year-old Iranian woman, recalled how the handcuffs dug into her wrists. She begged the officers to loosen them, but they did not. Other passengers had it worse, she said. Some of the men were restrained in black and yellow body wraps, as if mummified, after resisting orders to get on the plane.

This was done at a point in time where the courts system had ruled that she was free to work and stay in the US.

After more than a year locked up in a US immigration detention centre, Nika, whose name the Guardian has changed to protect her family in Iran, was granted legal protections and freed on a judge’s orders. Within two weeks, the Department of Homeland Security had rearrested her, and days later she was on the plane heading 7,000 miles east.

The country she was sent to is not one that really any US citizen should be going to at present:

The Department of State warns US citizens not to travel to CAR because it says it is too dangerous.

Nika has no connection whatsoever to the Central African Republic. The current US administration has forcibly deported over 25,000 people to countries that they did not originate from. This number comes from a sterling collaboration from the Guardian and 23 other media organisations investigating this issue which remains otherwise shrouded in secrecy. They themselves say it’s likely an under-count.

The US legal system has recently ruled that the current system is entirely unlawful, albeit for a narrower set of reasons than I’d say was the moral imperative to stop it at once:

A US federal appeals court ruled on Friday that third-country removals were unlawful, arguing that they violated due process because people are not notified with enough time to mount a legal challenge to the decision to send them to another country.

And at an individual level:

Many are people whose fear of returning home was deemed so credible that immigration judges barred their removal from the US

And no, it’s not all the violent criminals that the lying Trump administration claims it is:

The Trump administration has said the people it deports are criminals. Yet documents obtained by the Washington Post as part of this project show that a majority of the 35 countries that have signed deals with the US have said they will not accept migrants with violent criminal records.

Rather, it’s often people that are perfectly happily settled and contributors to the US:

The people forced on to planes include those who spent most of their lives in the US, parents detained on the school run, the adult children of elderly relatives who depend on them for care.

The article is far longer and has many more case studies. It’s something everyone should read. It’s important to understand what is actually going on, not least for us in the UK wherein a certain set of people who may one day, God forbid, gain the power the have control over such things, look at the US immigration system as desirable to, perhaps ironically, import. It is cruel, it is a moral disaster, it is secretive, it is seemingly often conducting illegal actions. It should stop. It must spread to our country, or indeed anywhere else.