The Dispossessed by John Washington

Author:John Washington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Third Attempt

10

Arnovis returned to El Salvador in chains.

Along with about another hundred men and a few women, private security guards chained Arnovis ankle, waist, and wrist, loaded him onto a charter plane, and flew him to Central America as one among the many millions of people deported from the United States in the last decade, part of what Daniel Kanstroom calls “the new American diaspora.” Transfer and deportation days are discombobulating and awful for deportees. It’s common to be transferred multiple times in the days leading up to deportation, given little food, woken up at three in the morning, left to wait for hours on buses and airplanes, and sometimes chained for twenty-four or more hours straight. In fact, ICE’s guidelines for transferring a detainee stipulate that they are only to be notified “immediately prior” to the transfer, and once they are finally notified they are not allowed any phone calls, neither to their family nor, if they have one, to their attorney. More than one deportee told me about urinating in his pants after not being allowed to use a bathroom during the long deportation process, or, if they were let into the bathroom, the guards wouldn’t take off the chains, leaving them to struggle with a fly zipper while handcuffed. One older deportee, a grandfather, cried while telling me how humiliated he felt.

In 1954, during Operation Wetback, as the Eisenhower administration worked to deport over a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the government converted cargo ships to use for mass deportations. The ships would transport bananas and other cargo north, and unwanted people or extraneous labor south. On one of the voyages of the Mercurio, as it was carrying over five hundred migrants in a space meant for around ninety, the deportees rose up and mutinied. As the crew fought to take back the ship, at least forty of the “passengers” jumped into the sea to escape; seven of them drowned. One congressman, Joseph Kilgore, probably accurately described the boatlift as a “penal hellship,” and you can almost hear the deportees chanting, as did the Jews who were sent back on the St. Louis, We must not sail! We must not sail! We must not sail!

After touchdown, Arnovis and the other deportees were transferred to a bus and driven to La Chacra, a sprawling migrant reception campus in San Salvador that receives around thirteen thousand people a year.

The day I first got inside La Chacra—I’d spent a few days waiting outside and trying—seventy-four men and eleven women had been deported. I spoke for an hour with the director, Ana Solórzano, who was very friendly, and pretty vague, and pointed me repeatedly to a six-step “modelo de atención.” She told me, at one point—seeming to refer to the whole process of forced displacement, detention, removal, vulnerability, and dismissal of valid asylum claims—“their condition, it’s not dignified.” Solórzano also took me on a hurried tour of the facility, which felt like a small campus. In the clothes stockroom, there were

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.