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Deported to Death: What It Means to 'Go Back' to Somalia
Source: Daily Beast
THE POINT OF NO RETURN
Deported to Death: What It Means to ‘Go Back’ to Somalia
The process was long and began under Obama, but under Trump everything speeded up. After years in detention, Ahmed Salah Hassan was rushed back to the failed state he had fled.
Amanda Sperber
Updated 08.09.19 5:48AM ET / Published 08.09.19 4:42AM ET
MOGADISHU, Somalia—Ahmed Salah Hassan walked across Africa and Latin America to get to the United States. He traversed nearly 20 national borders, hiked the Darién Gap—a 60-mile patch of untamable jungle and swamp—and braved the checks at the U.S. southern border.
But Hassan, looking for freedom and safety, never found it in the United States. When he finally, legally, crossed into Brownsville, Texas, in the spring of 2015, he was detained immediately. That set off a two-year odyssey through immigration detention centers—first at the LaSalle ICE Processing Center in Louisiana, then at Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, before he was deported back to Somalia, the country he’d fled nearly a decade earlier.
“Friends and family said Hassan believed there could be no life for him in Somalia, and he was right.”
Hassan’s story started well before Donald Trump claimed that Somali-born U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and other women of color in Congress should “go back” to the countries they came from. But that is what Hassan was forced to do.
His time in America ended in late January 2017, less than a week after Trump’s inauguration, when he was put on a chartered flight full of deportees to Somalia. And in March of this year, Hassan died in a restaurant bombing in the Somali capital Mogadishu, killed in the sort of violence from which he’d fled in the first place.
-snip-
Deported to Death: What It Means to ‘Go Back’ to Somalia
The process was long and began under Obama, but under Trump everything speeded up. After years in detention, Ahmed Salah Hassan was rushed back to the failed state he had fled.
Amanda Sperber
Updated 08.09.19 5:48AM ET / Published 08.09.19 4:42AM ET
MOGADISHU, Somalia—Ahmed Salah Hassan walked across Africa and Latin America to get to the United States. He traversed nearly 20 national borders, hiked the Darién Gap—a 60-mile patch of untamable jungle and swamp—and braved the checks at the U.S. southern border.
But Hassan, looking for freedom and safety, never found it in the United States. When he finally, legally, crossed into Brownsville, Texas, in the spring of 2015, he was detained immediately. That set off a two-year odyssey through immigration detention centers—first at the LaSalle ICE Processing Center in Louisiana, then at Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, before he was deported back to Somalia, the country he’d fled nearly a decade earlier.
“Friends and family said Hassan believed there could be no life for him in Somalia, and he was right.”
Hassan’s story started well before Donald Trump claimed that Somali-born U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and other women of color in Congress should “go back” to the countries they came from. But that is what Hassan was forced to do.
His time in America ended in late January 2017, less than a week after Trump’s inauguration, when he was put on a chartered flight full of deportees to Somalia. And in March of this year, Hassan died in a restaurant bombing in the Somali capital Mogadishu, killed in the sort of violence from which he’d fled in the first place.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/deported-to-death-this-is-what-it-means-to-go-back-to-somalia