You’re an ICE agent with Cubans on your hands. Which country should you send them to?

It shouldn’t be this hard to do the right thing

Aristides Fernandez Garcia — Photo Credit: CBS Miami/YouTube

News item: Aristides Fernandez Garcia is among a group of Cubans captured by ICE, held at Alligator Alcatraz, then shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to a country he had never heard of before—the Central African Republic, a nation so dangerous that the U.S. State Department warns against travel there. Does this make sense?

By J.C. Bruce

Tropic Press

Imagine you’re an ICE agent.

Yeah, I know, an unpleasant thought, but bear with me.

You’ve rounded up some undocumented people from—say—Cuba, and now you have to load them on a plane and ship them out of the country because they don’t belong here, never mind all that blather on the Statue of Liberty about the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

So, based on that geography class you endured back in the sixth grade, which destination would make the least sense:

1. Havana, Cuba

2. Mexico City

3. Guatemala

4. Costa Rica

5. Africa

If you picked Number 1, I would redirect you to the question where I said “least” sense. So, try again.

Hint: Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica are close by and all speak Spanish.

OK, you’re not an ICE agent, so you know the correct answer is Africa, which would be an absurd place to send a Spanish-speaking person who didn’t know a single soul on a continent clear across the Atlantic Ocean.

What would they do with themselves when they arrived? Where would they turn for assistance? Who could they call?

Talk about hopeless and helpless.

So, of course, that’s just what American immigration officials are doing, as chronicled in numerous news stories in the past few weeks, including those of Cuban ex-pats in Florida, herded aboard planes in chains and dumped off on the other side of the world.

Why would we do such a thing to anyone? Is this someone’s idea of a cruel, sadistic joke?

The official explanations usually center on several points:

1. Sometimes “illegals” can’t be returned to their homelands because they might be endangered if they showed up there again. And there are laws that prevent that.

2. Sometimes their countries of origin won’t take them back.

3. We have deals with other nations to take refugees off our hands, so it’s all hunky-dory.

On that last point, it can’t be overemphasized that we’re the ones who drew up those deals. You can’t cook up schemes like this and then justify mistreating people because you have deals you, yourself, manufactured.

Sure, it’s not hard to imagine why a refugee from Cuba (or Venezuela or Iran or wherever) might be endangered returning home. We all get that.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we should at least consider the possibility for at least some of these people THAT’S WHY THEY RAN AWAY IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Which is why we have all those words on the Statue of Liberty:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Because that’s what America is: A sanctuary for desperate people yearning for a better life.

Message to all you ICE agents. Unless you are of Native American heritage, you are either an illegal immigrant yourself or the offspring of illegal immigrants because there never was a Customs Office processing passports and visas set up by the original inhabitants of this land.

Our ancestors just barged their way in, unannounced, unauthorized. Because they could. And they showed up here for the same reasons as those people you are now deporting.

Which is not to say there isn’t an issue here with illegal immigration, nor that there shouldn’t be a strategy in place to resolve it.

But scooping up people like roadside litter, and using the rest of the world as America’s dumpster, is as thoughtless as it is inhumane.

We’re supposed to be better than this.

Related Reading:

Cuban Man in South Florida Says He Was Deported to African Country He’d Never Heard of Without Being Told His Destination

Is dumping a Cuban person in Africa ‘deportation’?

---

---

Thanks for your support

Since this newsletter was launched a year ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have joined the Tropic Press community, making this one of the fastest-growing publications of its kind.

Our goal here is to reach as many voters as possible, so that we can increase engagement in the political process and, hopefully, raise interest in voting this coming November.

If you are encountering this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing. If you are already a subscriber, consider upgrading your subscription to help this work continue.

Regardless, every person you share this with is one more potential vote for change.

Please share and help us make Florida — and America — better for all of us.

Thanks.

J.C. Bruce

---