Historic Hate Trumps Happy Ending
President Biden: Stop Death Plane Deportations to Haiti, Now!
On March 28, 2024, I received an urgent email from my publisher. Her message was clear; her tone was unequivocal:
Sarah, if we are to get Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands into readers’ hands by publication day, June 18, we must send the final PDF to the printer without further delay.
In other words: Your time is up. Wrap up the Epilogue now!
When I turned the manuscript over to her on September 6, 2023, I did so “finished,” but for that final, last-minute, update to make the book as current upon publication as possible. So, while her production team nurtured my text to completion with copy-editing and fact-checking, followed by sensitivity reads and multiple rounds of proofreading, before sending it for layout and design as the calendar turned to 2024, I waited and hoped — I even searched — for a happy ending.
This meant that I waited and hoped — I even advocated at their doorsteps — for Biden and Secretary Mayorkas to grow some balls and stand against the MAGA-fueled anti-immigrant drift in the US, and up for the universality of human rights.
Once Biden lifted Title 42 — two years too late — in May 2023, Trump & Co’s metering practices had been gussied up in the guise of a smartphone app called CBP One. Meanwhile, reading more like dystopian fiction than fact, Lone Star State duplicity was only gaining steam. Featuring governors, attorneys general, high-court judges, and Border Patrol chiefs, squandering billions to stop a make-believe “invasion” to justify the unjustifiable, it victimizes the victims and criminalizes the caregivers, while celebrating the true barbarians: elected officials and their gatekeepers, who claim to be the “good guys” keeping us “secure.”
Rather than slapping all that back with the rule of law, however, Biden and Mayorkas caved, again and again and again, giving credence to the craven made-for-Fox-and-Breitbart TV spectacles, while shamefully dropping more Haitians back into a house on fire than the three previous presidential administrations combined.
On the flip side, a process had finally been established for returning to the US asylum-seeking Cameroonians, who’d been incarcerated under ICE without charge for an average of seventeen months, during which their basic human rights were routinely violated before they were violently and egregiously expelled in late 2020.
By February 2023, the top brass at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agreed with the findings of a small team, including yours truly, that rallied in defense of this community’s rights: officers of ICE Enforcement and Removals Operations (ICE ERO) had crossed the line. Actions taken against the approximately eighty-three Cameroonians forced onto mass deportation flights we dubbed The Death Planes — a tale detailed in Chapters 32 and 33 of Crossing the Line — were, indeed, beyond the pale. Humanitarian parole applications would be considered and the fees waived, they offered, if my colleagues and I could prove that crimes of “torture” and “refoulement,” as defined under both US and international law, had been committed by agents of the US federal government.
We could. But humanitarian parole applications are beastly and time-consuming, and our collective capacity was limited. So, we began with the easiest to argue, aka hardest to dispute, cases.
By July 2023, the first round of twenty-nine humanitarian parole applications had been filed with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), per instructions from our ICE advisor.
Six months later, in January 2024, as my attention turned to proofing the book galleys for Crossing the Line, we at the Cameroon Advocacy Network still had no answers.
I refused to lose hope, however. So the Epilogue remained unwritten.
In February, my publisher agreed to print Advance Reader Copies of Crossing the Line without an Epilogue, the book still unfinished.
By March 28, my hope and her patience having run out, I turned in the final pages, still struggling to bring to a close what, it turns out, is a tale with no end.
Then, a lot happened — in a short amount of time…
In early April, as Crossing the Line was being set up to print, we received news that “at least some” of the Death Plane passengers we’d been advocating for since 2021 “may” be allowed to re-enter the US to start their asylum processes anew. Simultaneously, Congress boosted Homeland Security funding above its record-breaking haul of $29.8 billion for fiscal year 2024, giving ICE expanded liberty to incarcerate 41,500 non-criminal offenders on any given day—up from 34,000. This was a win for only two groups: the demagogues and profiteers benefiting from the mass incarceration and deportation of people yearning to live free, in dignity, and in peace.
In mid-April, we received the first approval. Two more approvals followed, roughly a week later. Then came three more, as well as a process for gathering temporary travel documents for people who, after living in hiding since late 2020, had no passports.
In early May, the first person to be approved met harassment and potential arrest when he tried to board a plane. He missed it. The cost of the flight would not be reimbursed and he was gripped by fear and re-traumatization. But he agreed to try again. Same result. Finally, on his third try, our first Death Plane passenger to be returned under humanitarian parole touched down at Dulles International Airport.
That was Monday, May 13, 2024. By the end of the week, all twenty-nine humanitarian parole applications had been approved.
Hope had returned! But only briefly, for the sound of twenty-nine people singing their joy and relief was drowned out just three days later, on May 16, 2024, when Biden and Mayorkas resumed ICE Air expulsion flights to Haiti, after halting ICE ERO operations two months before due to the dire country conditions.
The society that has never been forgiven for rising up against oppression to declare its right to dignity and independence; the nation that has been beset, again and again and again, by political and natural disasters so myriad, each one has felt more devastating than the last; the people that have been subject to decades of brutality perpetrated by gang members, paramilitaries, and so-called “elected” officials, alike, now teeters on the brink of collapse.
In chapter 18 of Crossing the Line, I illustrate how the catastrophic events of two centuries, multiple decades, and a debilitating last few years — during which time US interventions have brought only more harm than good — have culminated in humanitarian crisis upon humanitarian crisis upon humanitarian crisis, leading to human suffering and misery on an unprecedented scale.
Yet all the world powers can think to do is respond with more law and order: UN cops from Nigeria.
And all the US government can think to do is drop more men, women, children, and the elderly back into a house engulfed in flames.
There is no justification for it. There is no explanation other than historic hate: hate that has trumped what might have been a happy ending for my story collaborators. A sad metaphor for my struggle to bring to a close what, it turns out, is a tale with no end. Certainly not a happy one.
Death Plane deportations to Haiti, to everywhere really, must stop. By ICE’s own silent admission, evidenced by the agency's agreement to bring back our Cameroonian clients and friends: ICE Air, aka the Deportation Machine, crosses the line, every flight, every day.
It is a win for only two groups: the demagogues and profiteers making money off human misery and pain.
But don’t take my word for it. Join me, Ray Rodriguez, and Samuel Temple-Cole in Washington, DC, on July 8, 2024, to hear from those most directly impacted what life is like when you’re trapped under ICE.
Sarah, thank you for your eloquent (and persistent) denunciation of racist US immigration policies via your documentation. May "Crossing the Line" inform and inspire a wider audience to seek justice for migrants. (Ken Burns - might a documentary based on this book be in order?)
I'm so glad that Death Plane passengers are getting in! But very sad for Haiti.