The guard made the threat clear, Clovis Fozao, one of the Cameroonian asylum-seekers, told The Intercept: If the detained migrants didn’t submit, they would be transferred to Bravo-Alpha, the detention unit where Covid-19-positive detainees are held in quarantine.
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After the threats and the assault, Fozao and the others gave up and submitted to the transfer. “What could we do?” he said. “There were so many more of them than us.”
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The men said that they were crammed into a van with other detainees and taken to a staging center in Alexandria, Louisiana, where migrants are often grouped together before a deportation flight.
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After an affidavit submitted by a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups was delivered to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, the deportation flight was canceled.
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The letter lists a host of violent tactics ICE officials used to pressure the detainees to submit to their deportation, alleging that they engaged in torture.
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Two days after taking office, President Joe Biden issued a 100-day deportation moratorium. Four days after it was signed, a judge in Texas granted an injunction on the moratorium. ICE wasted no time in ramping back up its deportation machine.
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As part of the same rush to continue deportations, Jusiel Mendez, a Cuban asylum-seeker being held in Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, said that this week he and a group of other Cuban asylum-seekers were also being threatened with exposure to Covid-19.
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Mendez told The Intercept that a ranking official at Etowah, who he called a “captain,” threatened to expose the group to the virus if the asylum-seekers didn’t sign their deportation orders.
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“They’re going to put me in solitary for this, for talking,” Mendez told The Intercept. “But I want people to know. What are they going to do, kill me? Maybe.”
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