“Deportation Flights Have Begun.” The deportation flights began. The photo released by the White House shows nine poor chained Christs while they go up to the column on a military cargo plane. They are not terrorists. And not even kidnappers, rapists, serial killers, thieves or perhaps supermarkets of supermarkets. They are clandestine immigrants, reduced to chains and shown to the public global digital ludibrium for having committed what for Trump is one of the worst of the crimes: reaching illegally in the United States in search of luck. As millions of men and women have done in the past, at the turn of the twentieth century or after the war by passing through Ellis Island: Irish, Germans, Italians, Spanish, Turks, Russians, Macedonians, Greeks whose surnames today fill the New York telephone directory and other American cities.
The chosen poor people are part of the 70-80 migrants in Guatemala, embarked on the military base of Fort Biggs near El Paso, in Texas, one of the warm areas of the border with Mexico. The Pentagon has made available two C-130 and two C-17 which, in coordination with the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, are used for expulsions. The repatriation procedure is always this, but the White House wanted to show everyone the harshness of its iron fist as a warning against “the invasion” of illegal immigrants.
A hardness declined on all fronts with the militarization of the border, where another 10 thousand soldiers are expected, and various executive orders: from the stop of all the requests of asylum pending to strengthen the police powers, authorized to enter also in churches e Schools with “Chilean” operations. So far over 700 people have been arrested in raids targeted in Chicago, New York, Boston and also in New Jersey.
According to Trump, justice needed an exemplary scene: the unfortunate all dress a jacket and a pair of pants, sneakers, like billions of men, but they have hands tied by a chain that descends by belonging to the hips to tighten even the feet, as if they were for forced labor. Among other things, the term “deportation” is an unhappy term, because it refers to the deportations of the Jews and the extermination of the Nazi concentration camps, on the eve of the day of the memory established globally with the resolution 60/7 of the United Nations General Assembly the first November 2005. Migrants’ chains are not only used to immobilize. They are used to humiliate, to send a symbolic message: those who challenge American law will lose everything, even dignity.
We do not know well if it is only a single exemplary photo: punish nine to educate one hundred thousand or perhaps three million, the latest generation judicial political marketing. But the scene is unworthy of a state of law, of a civilized country, of what has always been called the homeland of freedom. It brings to mind other similar detective scenes, as is done for example with the Colombian bosses arrested by the special forces, such as Joaquin Guzman called “El Chapo” or Pablo Escobar, or even certain war criminals including Milosevic, Karadzic, Noriega, Saddam . Exemplary but incivile scenes for a state of law even if they concern characters guilty of thousands of murders or authentic gaglioffi, but even more disgusting if they concern poor Christs, the new “miserable” to put it with Victor Hugo, who also wrote memorable pages in his work More famous describing the galleys in chains that crossed the streets of Paris.
The chains, an eternal symbol of oppression and control, tell a story of humiliation and deprivation. People, not numbers, forced lined up under the watchful gaze of the agents: a visual message that seems to be done specifically to satisfy a part of the public opinion, the “Trumpian” one who asks for hard punch and immediate repatriation. But behind each face there are stories that cannot be reduced to the mechanical gesture of a deportation: families who flee poverty, violence, by unsustainable living conditions.
He took a step back on the path of international humanitarian law. Social networks and other media have acute the penalty in a huge, gigantic, global media sedan worthy of the most hateful witch hunt. A scene that degrades the image of the United States as a land of freedom and refuge of the oppressed.
