{"id":835051,"date":"2026-09-03T10:30:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T10:30:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/835051\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T10:30:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T10:30:20","slug":"is-dumping-a-cuban-in-africa-deportation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/835051\/","title":{"rendered":"Is dumping a Cuban in Africa \u2018deportation\u2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n About two weeks ago, US authorities took Cubans, Venezuelans and other Latin Americans from detention centers and placed them on a flight to Liberia. When they landed, having spent the entire flight in shackles, some of the men refused to get off the plane, according to the Miami Herald.<\/a> They had no ties to the African continent, let alone Liberia.\n <\/p>\n

\n Reuters<\/a> reported that authorities told the captives who refused to leave the plane that they would be taken back to the US, but proceeded to fly them to Equatorial Guinea, one of the world\u2019s longest-standing dictatorships with a bleak human rights record. There, the Herald reported, they were taken to a hotel and confined, with no idea about when or how they might leave.\n <\/p>\n

\n This incident, one of many<\/a> such<\/a> transfers<\/a> that have occurred under the Trump administration, was described in news reports as a \u201cdeportation.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n EDITOR\u2019S NOTE:\u00a0 CNN\u2019s \u201cWord of the Week\u201d brings you the meaning behind the words in the news.\n<\/p>\n

\"20260831-culture-word<\/p>\n

\n As President Donald Trump and his administration seek to force immigrants out of the country en masse, the government has found<\/a> that some countries are refusing to take back their citizens. So the administration has devised a workaround to try to get closer to Trump\u2019s goal of deporting a million people a year: putting undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers on airplanes and delivering them to faraway countries to which they have no ties.\n <\/p>\n

\n For more than a century, the vast majority of people removed from the US have been sent back to their country of origin or to the country from which they entered, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. This is generally how the public understands the concept of deportation.\n <\/p>\n

\n But the Trump administration is going several steps further, sending people to unfamiliar countries where they face further confinement, sometimes indefinitely. In these instances, they are not free to start a new life; rather, they continue to be punished for ever having come to the US at all.\n <\/p>\n

\n The realities are so harrowing that some immigration advocates argue the word \u201cdeportation\u201d fails to capture the gravity of the situation.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201c\u2018Deportation\u2019 is an understatement because deportation doesn\u2019t fully express the randomness and the cruelty and the danger that comes with third-country deportations,\u201d said Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA.\n <\/p>\n

\n Anna O. Law, an immigration historian and professor at Brooklyn College, said that the lack of adequate vocabulary is severely hampering public understanding of the Trump administration\u2019s immigration crackdown. \u201cThe common understanding of what deportation means doesn\u2019t always comport with what is actually happening to people,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s underplaying the severity of the situation and the rights violations.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The word \u201cdeportation,\u201d derived from the Latin \u201cd\u0113port\u0101re,\u201d meaning to carry off, convey away or transport, was recorded in English as far back as 1595. In the US, the act of deporting noncitizens seems to predate the use of the word by about a century. The Alien Acts of 1798, which Trump has invoked<\/a> in his effort to oust migrants, granted the president powers to expel foreigners, though they used words such as \u201cdepart\u201d and \u201cremove.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n By 1893, the word \u201cdeportation\u201d had entered legal parlance. It appeared several times in the Supreme Court\u2019s decision on Fong Yue Ting v. the United States, which challenged a law that extended the Chinese Exclusion Act<\/a>. It also appeared in the Immigration Act of 1907, which restricted the kinds of immigrants that were allowed into the US.\n <\/p>\n

\"Security<\/p>\n

\n For a time, the US used both \u201cexclusion\u201d and \u201cdeportation\u201d to describe the act of removing someone from the country, said Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer and senior fellow for the Migration Policy Institute. \u201cExclusion\u201d referred to people who arrived at a port of entry and were deemed inadmissible, and \u201cdeportation\u201d referred to people who were already in the country and were ordered removed (\u201cexclude\u201d and \u201cdeport\u201d both appear in the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965). In 1996, according to Chishti, \u201cdeportation\u201d and \u201cexclusion\u201d were combined into \u201cremoval,\u201d which remains the official term.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cDeportation\u201d continues to be used colloquially, though.\n <\/p>\n

\n Though sending people to countries other than where they are from, a practice known as \u201cthird-country removal\u201d or \u201cthird-country deportations,\u201d is not new, Reichlin-Melnick said it was rarely used until recent years \u2014 he noted the shift began with Joe Biden\u2019s administration<\/a>, which returned non-Mexican migrants who entered at the southern US border back to Mexico at a larger scale than before. The Trump administration has ramped up the practice even further, entering into agreements with countries in Africa, Central Asia and Latin America to accept people that it wants out of the US, often in exchange for funding or other favors<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cFor the United States now to begin sending thousands of people to countries that are not their own, even though they come with the term \u2018removal\u2019 written into the law, it does suggest that it\u2019s something different,\u201d Reichlin-Melnick added.\n <\/p>\n

\n A removal order typically specifies what country the person is being deported to, Reichlin-Melnick explained. If a person cannot be returned to their country of origin or the country from which they entered, he said the law indicates that the person being removed can designate which country they want to be sent to \u2014 this could be a country where they hold dual citizenship, a country where they were born or a country that had sovereignty over the home country when they were born. The law stipulates that if it is \u201cimpractical, inadvisable, or impossible\u201d to send the person to one of those countries, then the US government can send the person to another country that will accept them.\n <\/p>\n

\n While this means the government can legally send a person to a third country of its choosing, Reichlin-Melnick said this provision of the law is intended as an exception, to be used when all other countries a person could be sent to have been ruled out. But the Trump administration, Reichlin-Melnick said, is weaponizing this exception and treating it as the rule.\n <\/p>\n

\n And even when the US government designates the country a person is sent to, it must still comply with certain rules. Under international and domestic law, Chishti said, the US cannot send a person to a country where they will face persecution or torture, a principle known as non-refoulement. It is also illegal to send an asylum seeker or refugee to a third country that will subsequently deport them to their home country, where they risk persecution or torture, a process known as chain refoulement.\n <\/p>\n

\n For years, Fischer said that human rights experts understood refoulement to mean returning refugees and asylum seekers to the countries they had come from. And while reporting from The Washington Post<\/a> and The New York Times<\/a> has indicated that some officials who have agreed to accept migrants from the US intend to send them back to their home countries, she said that migrants are at risk of human rights violations even in countries other than the ones they originally fled.\n <\/p>\n

\"People<\/p>\n

\n The Department of Homeland Security referred questions about third-country agreements to the State Department, which did not respond to a request for comment. But the Trump administration has previously said that its third-country agreements guarantee due process, and that the third countries are providing \u201cdiplomatic assurances<\/a>\u201d that the migrants won\u2019t be persecuted or tortured.\n <\/p>\n

\n As advocates<\/a> have noted, however, many migrants aren\u2019t given a proper hearing and receive as little as a day\u2019s notice before they are sent to a distant country, where they are detained upon arrival. Without papers or cellphones, they have no access to basic means of living. The poor human rights records of the countries that agreed to accept them are further cause for alarm<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThat is a level of officially sanctioned cruelty that really no administration in the modern era has engaged in,\u201d Reichlin-Melnick said, \u201cand really exemplifies the need for Congress to step in and do something.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Is there a better word than \u201cdeportation\u201d to describe the Trump administration\u2019s campaign of sending people to countries where they have never been, where they don\u2019t know anyone or speak the language and where they might face human rights violations?\n <\/p>\n

\n Law said she didn\u2019t have language for such circumstances. Fischer said \u201cintentional cruelty\u201d and \u201cchaos\u201d were what came to mind. Elsewhere, some<\/a> scholars<\/a> and immigration experts<\/a> have compared certain third-country removals to \u201cextraordinary rendition,\u201d a term for when authorities bypass the process of extradition and transfer criminal suspects to jurisdictions with lower human rights standards.\n <\/p>\n

\n In an interview with Tampa Bay Times<\/a> reporter Juan Carlos Chavez, one Cuban immigrant who was living in Florida and spent months in detention before he was sent to Africa had another word for what was done to him: He called it a \u201ckidnapping.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About two weeks ago, US authorities took Cubans, Venezuelans and other Latin Americans from detention centers and placed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":835052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,41666,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-835051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-ctt","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=835051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/835052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=835051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=835051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=835051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}