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When I was a little boy and my friend and I got caught doing something dangerous, I would tell my mother: “But Paul did it first.”
She’d always reply: “And if Paul jumped off a bridge first, would you jump, too?”
If only my mother were still around to talk to Mr. Trump.
His administration’s apparent plan to send migrants to Libya is as unoriginal as it is dangerous. He wouldn’t be the first to jump off this bridge.
For years, the European Union and member states have cooperated with abusive Libyan Coast Guard forces. They’ve been providing them with supplies, technical support, and aerial surveillance. The aim is to help them intercept Europe-bound migrants at sea.
Migrants and asylum seekers who are then returned to Libya with the EU’s support face horrific conditions in detention. Overcrowding, lack of food and water, forced labor, exploitation of children, beatings, rape, and torture are all well-documented.
As Human Rights Watch expert Hanan Salah succinctly puts it, Libya’s detention centers are “hellholes.”
That the EU and member states are complicit in sending people to such hellholes is appalling.
And now, it seems, the US wants to do it, too?
There have been numerous media reports to that effect, citing Trump administration officials. However, the situation isn’t entirely clear.
Various authorities in fractured Libya have denied any deal with the US.
On Wednesday, when asked about the plans, Trump said: “I don’t know.”
That same day, a US judge ruled the government cannot immediately proceed with deporting people to Libya.
Then, on Friday, reports emerged that detained migrants in Texas had apparently almost been sent to the north African country. They’d been bussed to a military airfield on Wednesday, where they were told they were about to be deported to Libya.
They waited on the tarmac for hours, but the Libya destination – if that’s what it was – somehow fell through. They were bussed back to the detention center instead.
It’s hard to say if what happened actually represents second thoughts by the US administration or not. After all, under Trump, authorities have been carrying out abusive mass deportations to other countries, like El Salvador and Panama.
It would be nice to imagine the administration has come to its senses about deportations to Libya – that they took a conscious decision not to jump off the same dangerous bridge as the EU. Perhaps, more realistically, the US government is simply obeying the court order.
Either way though, for the moment at least, it’s a rare bit of welcome news.
No government should be complicit in sending people to hellholes in Libya.
