Refugee Deportations and Other Stories

After the Second World War, under the now in shambles rules-based order, there was an agreement to open borders to refugees. It was partly because of the Holocaust and things like the MS St Louis.

Full disclosure, friends of my dad and mom were survivors of this ship, and the subsequent death camps. So we did hear some of the stories, including the desperation to land anywhere in the Americas. They knew returning to Europe was a death sentence.

So here we are, history is repeating itself. And as my husband put it, it's also about telling people, we don’t care where you came from…we are sending you back. It matters little if we are sending you to your death:

According to The Guardian, US immigration authorities deported dozens of Russian asylum seekers to Moscow, including a serviceman wanted for desertion and subsequently detained.

According to interviews with passengers and human rights activists, at least two deportation flights organized by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took off from the agency’s main detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, and landed in Cairo, Egypt, where asylum seekers were transferred to flights to Moscow with the assistance of Egyptian and Russian authorities.

The first flight departed in mid-June and carried about 30 Russian…