Friend,
We’ve just filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit demanding information about the U.S. government’s wrongful deportation of asylum seekers to Cameroon in late 2020. The lawsuit, filed in partnership with the Center for Constitutional Rights and Project South, builds on previous requests for information that the U.S. government has disregarded.
In the year since the Cameroonians were unjustly sent away, numerous reports of abuse during the deportation process have come to light. Our lawsuit is part of an effort to hold the U.S. government accountable for its brutal treatment of Black immigrants (in this and other instances) – and to protect these immigrants from further harm.
What happened in this case? Here’s a quick overview, including a basic summary of the situation in Cameroon:
- Cameroon, a nation in west-central Africa home to 26 million people, is in the midst of a civil war that has displaced some 700,000 people and inflicted widespread suffering on civilians. The war is a legacy of colonialism. After World War I, France and Great Britain divided up the country. A century later, tensions run high between the country’s Francophone majority and Anglophone minority – and when Anglophone rebels declared independence in 2017, those tensions exploded into war.
- Members of Cameroon’s English-speaking minority face extreme, life-threatening peril at home. And yet U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) saw fit to deport two planes’ worth of English-speaking Cameroonian asylum seekers last year.
- Since those flights, numerous reports have indicated that ICE officials used pepper spray and other forms of abuse to force those asylum seekers to sign their own deportation orders. “When they arrived, they pepper sprayed me in the eyes … and strangled me almost to the point of death,” said one asylum seeker. “As a result of the physical violence, they were able to forcibly obtain my fingerprint on the document.”
- Of the 60 Cameroonian asylum seekers deported on one flight, at least six filed a complaint before they were deported, alleging that ICE officials tortured them for refusing to sign travel documents that would have facilitated their deportation. At least one other individual reported being subjected to an invasive gynecological procedure without full consent.
- The dangerous conditions in Cameroon have spurred calls to provide the 40,000 Cameroonian refugees in the U.S. with Temporary Protected Status. Yesterday, a group of House members introduced a bill that would do just that.
- The original FOIA requests that have, so far, been disregarded by the U.S. government sought demographic data and internal communications concerning the deportation of Cameroonian immigrants between August 1, 2020, and February 26, 2021. In that period, immigration advocacy groups filed two civil rights complaints detailing ICE’s violent and coercive tactics against Cameroonian asylum seekers. The complaints remain unresolved.
Our FOIA lawsuit demands the government respond to our requests for information.
“Especially after the events of the last month [when photos of border patrol agents brutally rounding up Haitian refugees were widely published], there is no doubt that Black immigrants are disproportionately subject to harm and abuse by our immigration system,” said Luz Lopez, a senior supervising attorney with the SPLC. “This is why it is more important now than ever that the abuses these Black immigrants suffered, as a result of these deportations, are not simply swept under the rug. There must be transparency and the truth must come out in order to prevent future similar abuses.”
You can read the full complaint here, or visit our website to learn more about our Immigrant Justice work.
In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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