This Is What Mass Deportation Looks Like...
The single-plank MAGA-party platform promises only one thing: Boxcars in the Sky
The 2024 MAGA-party platform has exactly one plank that we can be sure of:
Hating on newcomers to the United States.
“We must deport the millions of illegal (sic) Migrants (sic) who Joe Biden has deliberately encouraged (sic) to invade (sic) our Country (sic),” reads The Heritage Foundation’s marching orders, called Project 2025, prepared for a Trump 2.0 presidency. In addition to killing off the Departments of Justice and Education, they promise to “begin [the] largest deportation program in American history.”
Many MAGA-party faithful at the “Republican” National Convention this week—and even some GOP sycophants who’ve bent the knee to a convicted felon and known sex offender—enthusiastically held signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”
But do they know what mass deportation looks like? Do they understand the cruelty required to rip folks away from their families, corral them in chains into ICE prison camps, and expel them to places some have never known on ICE Air Abu Ghraibs—what I call in my new book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, Boxcars in the Sky?
Do they have any clue what such an endeavor costs in time, money, and human capital? Dollars and potential that could be spent educating our children, upgrading our crumbling infrastructure, building affordable housing, bolstering our beleaguered asylum system, bringing down the cost of life-saving medicines, etc., etc., etc.?
I believe that if they knew, they’d be outraged too. And so will you, if you read on.
Be advised. The rest of this post could be triggering…
From Crossing the Line, Chapter 32: Locked In
As I am not one of the directly impacted persons whose horrors I’ve been permitted to share here, I can only imagine the terror and humiliation they felt based on the experiences they shared with me. I, therefore, must ask you to imagine, too...
If you’ve ever been on a long-distance, economy-class flight, you will know that the body fatigues from sitting in the same position for too long. Though seatbacks recline, it’s challenging for many to rest with knees bent and legs dangling. The joints swell, both from inaction as well as from the cabin’s lower-than-normal humidity, which sucks moisture from the tissues and cells, causing dehydration. Shoes become uncomfortably tight; hands lose their grip. Even a six-hour journey across the continental US can be taxing to the lower back, hips, knees.
Now imagine being forced to fly across half the US as well as the Atlantic Ocean with your ankles in manacles, your hands bound in cuffs, and tied tightly to a waist chain. Imagine the links of the waist chain planting themselves into your spine and back muscles. Imagine not being able to shift or adjust them because you are bound—for sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six, even forty-eight hours in the case of the botched 2019 ICE Air Omni Air International flight to Somalia documented in Shackled (Rebecca Sharpless, 2024).
Imagine sitting for sixteen hours to Douala, Cameroon, your ankles and hands swelling, causing the metal hardware to pierce your skin and eat into your nerves. You are unable to kick off your shoes and shake off the wrist guards. You are unable to reach the button to push your seat back to relieve the pressure on your hip joints. Imagine your panic at a moment of turbulence when you realize that in the event of an emergency you will not be able to place over your nose and mouth the oxygen mask that drops from above; you will not be able to open the hatch if the aircraft lands on water; you will not be able to grab a life buoy or to tread water in the event you must deplane in a hurry. You will not be able to hurry. You will be helpless.
Imagine being fed nothing but stale white bread and potato chips. Imagine having to bend over, like a dog, to eat the tasteless, salty fare because your chains are so tight, you cannot bring your hands to your mouth to feed yourself. Imagine not wishing to eat like a dog and going without, for sixteen hours, maybe more.
Imagine your mouth and nose so parched, the natural, human act of breathing causes you pain. Imagine hours passing before anyone offers you water. Now imagine being physically unable to raise the plastic bottle up to your bone-dry lips and throat.
“To get a drink,” recounts Oscar, “you had to squeeze both your hands around the container to push the water out the top and try to catch a little on your tongue.”
Imagine not being allowed to go to the bathroom without the escort of an armed guard. Imagine having to shuffle your way down the aircraft aisle in manacles and chains with a bladder full to bursting only to find, when you reach the cabin restroom, that the guard refuses to close the door. It is impossible, of course, to lower zipper and trousers with your hands enchained. Imagine missing and soiling yourself. Imagine your escort erupting in laughter, shaming you. Imagine returning to your seat, made to sit in your own urine and feces.
Imagine being a menstruating woman denied a fresh pad; or given one but unable to apply it to soiled panties with bound hands. Imagine even wanting to try with the toilet door left open, and a male guard peering in. Laughing. Imagine.
Imagine that for sixteen hours, or more, no one has cleaned the toilets. The November 2020 Death Plane did not touch down in Luanda, Angola, for thirty-four hours and forty minutes after takeoff from Alliance Field, according to Tom Cartwright’s data. Imagine being enchained for that long in a cabin overpowered by the stench of human excrement. Imagine trying desperately to hold it, but finally giving into the call of nature and the stench being so bad your body takes over. You pee in your pants as you retch, adding to the unholy mess.
I’m told it wasn’t just the raw essence of human waste, moreover, that infused Omni Air International N207AX. There was the constant sobbing of passengers; the ceaseless yelling of guards dressed for war and toting guns; and the odor of nervous, panicked sweat. Again quoting Oscar: “It was torture. You could smell the trauma.”
Oscar wasn’t the only one to say so. The four-dozen-plus testimonials I collected from those forced into this ICE Air torture chamber collectively describe a flying Abu Ghraib. Inflight torture chambers that cost the US taxpayer approximately $1 million per mission.
The late, great Toni Morrison stated in 1995, “Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”
In today’s global response to forced displacement and migration, we are careening down a similar course—one that history will not soon forgive, or forget—if we are not there already.
Are we really okay with looking away as human rights are violated in our name? Is this who we really wish to be?
I don’t think so.
We can do better. We must do better.
Wow, this is powerful. The article did not go where I expected it to. I thought it would be more about how the rounding up of immigrants from our towns and cities would impact the people in those places. I had not thought it would be about the process of what deportation looks like.