David J. Phillip/AP Photo
An officer watches as immigrants who entered the United States illegally are deported on a flight to El Salvador by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Houston.
The sun was setting on the outskirts of Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, where G.N. has been hiding out since his deportation on October 13. A Cameroonian asylum seeker who spent two and a half years in ICE detention, G.N.’s claim was still under appeal in the Fifth Circuit court when ICE shackled him and forced him onto an Omni Air charter flight out of Fort Worth, Texas, to Douala, along with 56 other Cameroonian asylum seekers and 28 Congolese who were taken to Kinshasa, DR Congo. He is now staying with family members, scared of being targeted both by the government and by armed separatists.
The majority of the deported Cameroonians say they fear being arrested in the near future because they are Anglophone and asked for asylum in the U.S. Two deported men and pro-government media said that Cameroonian authorities have imprisoned at least two people since they have returned, though a Cameroonian prison authority in the capital, Yaoundé, denied that. ICE has scheduled another deportation flight for Cameroonians on Tuesday, and detainees on that flight are worried they will face a similar fate.
G.N. and the other asylum seekers have been sent back to a Cameroon under siege, caught between a repressive Francophone government and an Anglophone separatist movement that has fought a brutal armed struggle for an independent state since 2017. Gunmen recently attacked a school in Kumba, a town in the Anglophone Southwest region, killing seven children and injuring 13 others. Last Tuesday, assailants stormed another school in the Anglophone town of Kumbo and kidnapped 12 teachers. The Cameroonian government, led by President Paul Biya, the 87-year-old in charge of the country for the past 38 years, arrested key opposition politicians earlier in October.
The asylum seekers have been sent back to a Cameroon under siege, caught between a repressive Francophone government and an Anglophone separatist movement.
Upon arrival at Douala International Airport, Cameroonian police and gendarmes gathered the 48 men and nine women for more than 12 hours to administer COVID-19 tests, question why they left Cameroon, and ask what connections they had to separatist groups. The police who questioned them confiscated their national identification cards and other personal documents, including passports if they had them, according to the asylum seekers and immigration advocates who have spoken with them since their return.
Without national ID cards, the deported asylum seekers are unable to work legally, send or receive money, stay in a hotel, rent an apartment, register a SIM card, leave the country, or perform other essential tasks that would allow them some semblance of stability. The police issued them each a single document on printer paper that describes the men and women’s situation as deportees, explains that they have had the identification cards confiscated, and that they should use that paper if they want to travel within the country.
Unable to make money and plunged back into a volatile political situation, the asylum seekers are completely dependent on the goodwill of friends and family to find food and housing. “We are still in prison in a way,” said one asylum seeker, who asked not to be named for security reasons.
After their time in the airport, gendarmes brought the 57 men and women to a government housing complex in Yassa, a neighborhood on the southeastern outskirts of Douala, where their stays varied from one day to more than a week. From Yassa, they were released, and sought out families and friends to stay with.
When the police questioned G.N., they found a member’s card for the Southern Cameroons National Council, an outlawed group that advocates peacefully for Anglophone statehood, he said. G.N. had told ICE officials to remove the card from his files before the flight took off, but they refused to do so. When the Cameroonian police found the card, they arrested him, saying, “You are the ones that bring instability in the country, you will have to pay a price, we will judge you in a military court.” They brought him to Yaoundé, where they detained him for six days and beat him. He was released when his uncle paid a $1,000 bribe, he said. The prison authorities denied his arrest, abuse, and bribe claims.
F.B., a deported asylum seeker who said his mother was killed by Cameroonian soldiers and who was briefly imprisoned before fleeing the country in 2018, said that four police officers questioned him upon arrival in Douala airport. “Cameroon military people came and took eight to 10 people out of the airport, and we never heard anything about them again,” he said in an interview in the small Anglophone town he is hiding in. “If I go back to my hometown, I might go back to jail or they might kill me. I still fear for my life,” he said.
“What this is, is a pattern of ICE disappearing and deporting key witnesses to investigations. ICE does this so they can continue to thrive in secrecy.”
Of the 57 Cameroonians who were deported, at least eight were victims and key witnesses in cases of human rights abuses while in ICE detention, which the agency said it was investigating. Two women, Josephine Lawong Kinaka and Noela Kah Sala, had alleged medical malpractice while in detention at Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, where at least 57 women have said “they underwent or were pressured to undergo unnecessary treatments.”
Six men said they were tortured, as pressure to sign their deportation orders, in Adams County Detention Center in Natchez, Mississippi. Another man was part of a group of 48 hunger strikers who protested racist treatment and what they said were illegal actions from asylum judges while at Pine Prairie detention center in Louisiana. None of the 57 were shown their travel documents that ICE used to deport them, which is illegal according to immigration advocates.
D.F., one of the men who was tortured at Adams County, said ICE officers told him to fingerprint his deportation orders. When he refused, an ICE officer “pressed my neck into the floor. I said, ‘Please, I can’t breathe.’ I lost my blood circulation. Then they took me inside with my hands at my back where there were no cameras,” he recounted. “They put me on my knees where they were torturing me and they said they were going to kill me.”
Shortly after an official complaint was made by eight immigration advocacy groups, the Adams County men were transferred to Prairieland Detention Center outside Dallas, Texas, to be deported. As they were moved from Prairieland to Fort Worth Alliance Airport, some asylum seekers resisted and were met with violent repression, as Cameroonian-led protesters just outside the airport grounds chanted slogans for hours to free the women and men. “There are so many people who resisted getting into the plane,” said F.B. “They had to tie them up, they had to roll them in foam, like a mattress, put helmets on their head, handcuffs on their hands and feet, tie both their legs and put them in the plane and tie them to the chair.”
Two of the men were removed from the flight after Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Karen Bass (D-CA), chairs of the Homeland Security Committee and the Congressional Black Caucus, respectively, as well as three other House Democrats led by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), sent two separate letters to ICE on October 13 demanding a halt to the deportations and an investigation into the alleged torture. ICE has still not responded to either of those letters, according to a staffer in Rep. Omar’s office and a spokesperson for the Congressional Black Caucus. ICE did not respond to a request to comment about the investigation.
“What this is, is a pattern of ICE disappearing and deporting key witnesses to investigations. ICE does this so they can continue to thrive in secrecy,” said one of the authors of the Adams County complaint, Sofia Casini, director of visitation advocacy strategies at Freedom for Immigrants. “Those men on that flight could corroborate the physical torture that took place at Adams County Correctional Center for themselves as well as for the two men who remain for the investigation that we hope is taking place,” she said.
The Cameroon American Council’s CEO Sylvie Bello is pushing for Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) or Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Cameroon for a period of 18 months, which would ensure that asylum seekers are not sent back to a situation that puts their lives at risk. “With Cameroon rapidly descending into multiple crises with devastating human consequences, it is imperative that the United States ensure nationals and those who habitually last resided in Cameroon are able to remain here,” Bello wrote in a letter to President Trump and ICE Acting Secretary Chad Wolf.
More deportations loom on November 10, according to immigration advocates, and Cameroonians in detention are scared of what might happen to them.
The Trump administration has terminated Temporary Protected Status for over 300,000 immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan, though there are still court cases blocking those decisions in a number of countries. President-elect Joe Biden has said he would “protect TPS and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) holders from being returned to countries that are unsafe,” though he has not specified which countries those would be, and did not outline a policy for African immigrants in his platform.
Despite Cameroon not figuring as a major priority for the State Department, the U.S. has an outsized influence in the conflict between Anglophones and Francophones, a colonial legacy that sparked a civil war and forced more than 500,000 people from their homes, according to the U.N. Some 10,000 Cameroonians have sought asylum or otherwise tried to immigrate to the U.S. since 2016, according to Sylvie Bello.
The U.S. and France have the ability to pressure President Biya by prioritizing the Cameroon conflict at the U.N. Security Council, but have chosen not to do so. The U.S. has trained and equipped the BIR, an elite Cameroonian military unit that has carried out some of the worst human rights abuses in the Anglophone regions.
There are limited congressional efforts to stop the conflict. Senate Resolution 684, introduced by Sen. James Risch (R-ID), calls “on the Government of Cameroon and separatist armed groups from the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions to end all violence, respect the human rights of all Cameroonians, and pursue a genuinely inclusive dialogue toward resolving the ongoing civil conflict in Anglophone Cameroon.”
In the meantime, more deportations loom on November 10, according to immigration advocates, and Cameroonians in detention are scared of what might happen to them. At least one person on the flight is a former member of the BIR who deserted the military and will face certain imprisonment upon arrival, according to his cousin.
G.N. warned about the dangers they might face and pleaded for help to stop another round of deportations. “The crisis in Cameroon is worse than when I left. People should please, please try to hear the cry of English-speaking Cameroonians and Cameroonians as a whole,” he said. “If they had heard my cry in the first place, I wouldn’t have been in this situation.”
Joe Penney contributed reporting from New York City, and Christian Locka contributed reporting from Douala and Yaoundé, Cameroon.
