In its effort to increase deportations of migrants, the Trump administration announced Tuesday evening that it would send planeloads to the north African country of Libya.
That appeared to be news to Libya. Run by two governments — east and west — both administrations said Wednesday such actions would violate their rights as sovereign governments. In other words, it should be by their determination, not Trump’s, as to whether they would house the immigrants.
Which is overly generous.
Libya’s prisons are in league with El Salvador’s which human rights groups have criticized as inhumane in that they are severely overcrowded, and the prisoners are tortured, held in isolation, denied adequate healthcare and food and their constitution rights to due process have been suspended.
“It’s a whole litany of horrors,” reported Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace on Wednesday’s Newshour program of Libya’s prisons.
“When you first walk in, you’re immediately overwhelmed by the sheer mass of humanity that’s stuffed inside these narrow, windowless confines, obviously severe sanitation problems, routine beatings.
“The prison guards admitted to me that they routinely administer beatings as a matter of practice, sexual violence, malnutrition, all sorts of very visible ailments, infections.”
Such conditions are allowed, Wehrey said, because they view migrants’ lives as “expendable.”
Amnesty International has described Libya’s detention centers for migrants as a “hellscape,” saying it had found evidence of sexual violence against both adult and child prisoners.
Scheduled for the flight to Libya are a group of Laotian, Vietnamese and Filipino migrants.
THE ONLY hope for the migrants is the U.S. justice system.
To date, three federal courts have said the president cannot deport the migrants under the veil of the Alien Enemies Act.
Congress passed the Act in 1798, as war with France loomed, to enable the United States to swiftly remove foreigners who might pose a threat to national security.
The Act has been invoked only three times, always during a military conflict.
Most recently was during World War II when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese, German and Italian Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the war.
Of the three, the Japanese Americans were the most abused. More than 120,000 were forced to live in concentration camps from December 1941 until the war’s conclusion in 1945.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan apologized for the atrocity by signing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which admitted the government’s actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
