About two weeks ago, US authorities took Cubans, Venezuelans and other Latin Americans from detention centers and placed them on a flight to Liberia. When they landed, having spent the entire flight in shackles, some of the men refused to get off the plane, according to the Miami Herald. They had no ties to the African continent, let alone Liberia.
Reuters reported that authorities told the captives who refused to leave the plane that they would be taken back to the US, but proceeded to fly them to Equatorial Guinea, one of the world’s longest-standing dictatorships with a bleak human rights record. There, the Herald reported, they were taken to a hotel and confined, with no idea about when or how they might leave.
This incident, one of many such transfers that have occurred under the Trump administration, was described in news reports as a “deportation.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN’s “Word of the Week” brings you the meaning behind the words in the news.
As President Donald Trump and his administration seek to force immigrants out of the country en masse, the government has found that some countries are refusing to take back their citizens. So the administration has devised a workaround to try to get closer to Trump’s goal of deporting a million people a year: putting undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers on airplanes and delivering them to faraway countries to which they have no ties.
