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By Emile Schepers
The hostility of President Donald Trump and his entourage toward immigrants from the poorer countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean has long been notorious. It is at the root of a whole series of repressive policies aimed at those communities, including mass deportation and the horror of “children in cages” at the border. But now, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging, and with the United States itself the world epicenter, the health and lives of potentially millions of people in the countries to which deportees are sent are put at risk by the federal government’s deportation policies.
According to an analysis by the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the United States deported people to eleven countries in Latin America and the Caribbean between Feb. 3 and April 24 of this year, in a probable 232 separate flights, mostly by companies chartered by ICE. There was also a large number of overland deportations across the border to Mexico.
Besides Mexico, countries to which these individuals were deported include Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Brazil, and Jamaica. Ecuador and Brazil are also experiencing raging outbreaks of COVID-19, with many deaths and overwhelmed health care facilities. Deportations in the first three months of 2020 totaled 20,833.
The unsanitary conditions in which immigration detainees are kept in detention centers in the United States, including minor children and people seeking asylum, make such places incubators for COVID-19 and many other dangerous diseases. This notorious situation has led to denunciations and protests, including hunger strikes by detainees themselves. Now, people are being ejected from these facilities only to be dumped in much poorer countries that are even less able than the United States to handle a deadly pandemic.
In most of these countries, health care facilities, never adequately funded, have been whittled down to a shadow of their former selves by the implementation of neoliberal policies of...
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