Bluesky

Earlier this week, Trump officials let it be known that they were readying a military flight, filled with immigrants, to send to Libya. Questions quickly arose, like, who would be deported? The government wasn’t saying. Immigration lawyers subsequently said the people who had been informed they would be sent to Libya were from Vietnam, Laos, and the Philippines, among other countries.

And, who had signed on to the deal? After all, there are two rival governments in Libya and a slew of militias that also have political pretensions and control some proportion of the country’s land. It soon became apparent that no even remotely legitimate Libyan authority had given the nod to the deportation plan. Indeed, within a day of the initial rumors, both governments—the UN-recognized one in the west, and the strongman-led one in the east, controlled by militia leader Khalifa Haftar—had denied entering into an agreement with the United States to house deported migrants. So, too, other leading militias denied that they had approved the deal.

It also became clear that, regardless of whether anyone in Libya had approved of the military flights, this would become a lightning-rod issue, similar to the government’s deportation of migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT. Perhaps even more so than El Salvador, Libya has an abysmal human rights record, and would-be immigrants face appalling, and frequently deadly, conditions in the country’s web of immigrant detention centers.

America wouldn’t be the first country to dump migrants into Libya; the European Union has long paid Libya to intercept migrants hoping to travel from sub-Saharan Africa north across the Mediterranean and on to Europe. Human rights groups have documented numerous atrocities in the detention camps in which these migrants often end up. These range from torture and rape to executions. In some instances, migrants were apparently sold into slavery.

In 2023, the UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya found credible evidence of widespread crimes against humanity in the country, which has been riven by civil war for more than a decade. These included torture, human trafficking, executions, children being forced to serve in one or another rival military force, sexual violence, violence against members of the LGBTQ community, and restrictions on workers’ rights of association. In 2017, film footage surfaced of young migrants from sub-Saharan Africa being auctioned off in open-air slave markets. The purchase price for each slave was reported to be in the $400 range.

Last year, the US State Department noted the “life-threatening” conditions of prisons in Libya. Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières have each documented the awful conditions of prisons and immigrant detention centers in the war-ravaged country.

There is literally no legitimate reason for the Trump regime to send migrants in the US to Libya. Legal experts believe it would violate the Convention Against Torture and the Refugee Convention. In fact, the only conceivable rationales for sending immigrants to Libya are, first, to destroy the lives of those who had the temerity to seek sanctuary in the US; and, second, to instill the fear of God into others thinking about migrating to the US. It’s in the same vein as the deportations to CECOT, as well as the proposals that have been floating around to deport migrants to Rwanda, a country that the UK, under the conservative government that was in power until last year, also tried to deport asylum seekers to; it’s of a piece with the rumors that Trump’s people attempted to strong-arm Ukraine into accepting US flights of migrants.

All of this is literally the mirror opposite of Emma Lazarus’s stirring vision in her poem “The New Colossus,” etched into the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The Trump–Stephen Miller message to immigrants is dramatically darker: Dare to enter the US without a valid visa to try to claim asylum, or overstay your visa while simply dreaming of a future without dire poverty and constant fear of violence and—domestic laws and international law notwithstanding—you will be sent, as a prisoner, into some of the most dangerous countries and environments on earth. That’s about as pure a distillation of the concept of sadism as any I have ever encountered. It violates every international treaty and law on the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers, and it furthers the notion that America is looking to build a gulag archipelago, stretched out across multiple countries, for undocumented immigrants whom it is looking to expel.

On Wednesday, a judge in Massachusetts put a temporary hold on the government’s Libya plan. But only a fool would think the threat is now over. Trump 2.0 has its heart set on deporting immigrants into harm’s way, and, courts or no courts, it will seek ways to do so.

In Trump 1.0, the hatred was more scattershot, as were the “solutions.” For example, Trump called for migrants crossing the southern border to be shot in the legs; he also queried his team about the possibility of filling the Rio Grande, or a man-made moat along the border, with alligators, to discourage migrant crossing. Neither of those ghastly proposals ultimately went anywhere. This time around, the extremism is even more widespread. But it is also far more methodical. Having devoted much of its political capital to demonizing immigrants, it is itching to come up with the next headline-generating atrocity against these vulnerable individuals.

This isn’t, in any meaningful way, a government of, for, and by the people. Instead, it’s an edifice built on public displays of cruelty. We’ve seen this before. Let’s not mince words: It’s the spectacle of the iron boot.