Author: MOHAMED HAMALUDIN

When the United States decided to deport New York resident Orville Etoria, he said, it first sent him to Eswatini, a southern Africa country formerly called Swaziland. The 10,000-mile trip required two flights. Then he was repatriated to his native Jamaica, about 7,000 miles away, on four commercial flights. That roundabout journey covered about 17,000 miles. If he had been flown directly to the island, in the first place, it would have been a 1,500-mile trip and the ticket would have cost about $400.

“It was like something you’d see in a movie, as if we were some notorious gangsters,” Etoria, who did serve 28 years in prison after a murder conviction, told the New Yorker’s Sarah Stillman. He said he learned of his destination about half hour before the plane landed. “The [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officer came around wanting us to sign a paper saying we agreed to go to Eswatini,” Etoria said. “I’d never even heard of Eswatini!” He refused to sign but that did not matter.

Etoria told Stillman that an ICE official took what she understood to mean “paparazzi-style photographs” as he came off the plane, still wearing chains. “You could tell it was a charade, all for show, so that they could use it and say, ‘Look what we did,’” he said.

“To be honest,” said Etoria, 62, who came to the U.S. at age 12, “it helped me imagine how the slaves might have felt, going to another land in shackles and chains—that loneliness, that disconnect, that sense of loss.”

He added, “I want to say, to all the African nations who are taking people into their country in chains and shackles: It’s not a good picture. You’re hurting these people, spiritually and emotionally. I don’t just want Eswatini to hear it. I want Ghana to hear it. I want South Sudan to hear it. I want Rwanda and Uganda to hear it. … Please, let the Trump Administration take care of its own dirty work.”

During the 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump pledged to deport all estimated 11 million undocumented migrants, especially those with criminal records and members of overseas-based gangs. But, over the past year, he has been more explicit as to the reason for his crackdown, which includes closing the borders to would-be migrants and asylum-seekers, who are generally from small nations.

“I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of [former President Joe] Biden illegal admissions…and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States,” the President has stated. He pledged to denaturalize U.S. citizens “who undermine domestic tranquility” and deport “foreign nationals” deemed “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and the Administration’s point man on immigration, has elaborated on the President’s policy. With immigration, Miller has said, “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” He has said that the MAGA movement, as Robert McCoy put it in the New Republic, inherited “a civilizing mission from their ancestors,” including to “save humanity, “

According to Miller, “Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry [pulling] us out of the caves and the darkness into the light. We built the world that we inhabit now, generation by generation, and we will defend this world.” The mission, Miller has said, is to “save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic, because our children are strong, and our grandchildren will be strong, and our children’s children’s children will be strong.”

Of course, Miller is wrong about would-be immigrants wanting to come to the U.S. to take over the country and replace the majority European American population. If anything, they come seeking sanctuary; if they want chaos, they would have it back home, including almost intractable socio-economic conditions that are the legacy of brutal colonialism and occupation.

The Algerian Parliament, for example, recently declared that the country’s 132-year occupation by France was a crime, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported. Several other African and also Caribbean nations have been making that point for years as they too seek an apology and reparation for slavery and colonial domination.

The U.S., as a former colony itself, might have been expected to be sympathetic to the plight of the small nations but, as been previously noted, Daniel Immerwahr writes in his book “How to Hide an Empire,” subtitled “A History of the Greater United States,” that the U.S., too, has a history pf colonialism, having occupied the Philippines, Hawaii, Alaska and the Panama Canal Zone, at various times, and even now rules over Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa.

Still, the U.S., for many decades, was by far, the biggest aid donor to small states, even as their former colonizers balked at using some of the wealth they amassed by occupation to help them. However, the Trump Administration is focusing, instead, on an “America First” policy which has resulted in, among other actions, the abrupt termination of hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to small states.

Many of those countries being demonized are, in fact, fighting an uphill battle to restore stability, even as they try to combat a neo-colonialism which has seen foreign meddling, including military interventions. And some, according to some observers, remain victims of a continuing colonialism probably without knowing it: tourism.

Writing in the Guardian, Eleanor Shearer cites Common Wealth think-tank research as showing “how, over the 400 years since the first English ships arrived in Barbados, empire engineered a system of wealth extraction that shapes the tourism economies of today.”

Fiona Compton, a St Lucian artist, historian and founder of the Know Your Caribbean podcast, told Shearer that the impact of slavery “left a lasting mark on the Caribbean, long after the collapse of the sugar industry. Islands such as Barbados now have a ‘rebranded plantation economy built for leisure, instead of sugar.”

Compton described tourism as “cultural and economic dispossession continuing in real time. So many of our childhood spaces where we enjoyed total freedom have been taken over by beach chairs and security guards, who, if they don’t tell you to leave, hover around you to make you feel unwelcome.” Compton, Shearer said, “argues that the same land stolen from Indigenous people and systematically kept from Black people during colonization is now packaged and sold back to the world as ‘paradise.’”

Such considerations have made little impression on current American policy which has seemingly ignored calls even from Pope Leo XIV, head of 1.4 billion Roman Catholics worldwide, for a more humane approach to immigration control.

Perhaps the grim reality is best illustrated by a Nativity yard display in which, instead of a baby Jesus in a manger, there is a sign that reads, “ICE was here.”

Perhaps the homeowner wants to make the point that the immigration policy is un-Christian-like, that Jesus, in the Beatitudes, proclaimed, “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” And that He exhorted His followers to “Love thy neighbors as thyself.”

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Editor’s note: Hamaludin no longer writes a weekly column for South Florida Times but he will do so occasionally on topics which he believes should be addressed.