The Backstory
In October 2021, I was in Washington, DC, to participate in a week of political action organized by the newly formed Cameroon Advocacy Network, of which I was now a member. Texas A&M Law Professor Fatma E. Marouf and I were ready to file a complaint against US ICE for its deliberate and routine abuse of a human restraint device, called The WRAP, to force compliance on the many through the torture of the few (Crossing the Line, Chapter 33).
I uncovered the practice upon bearing virtual witness to a series of ICE Air mass deportation flights to Africa in the waning months of the Trump administration. Two flights, dubbed the Death Planes by advocates, returned approximately 83 asylum-seeking Cameroonians to their former persecutors in October and November 2020. After tracking down and interviewing roughly four dozen individuals from these two flights, it appeared to me that US federal agents were using The WRAP in a way that not only defied human decency but also violated US and international civil and human rights laws (Chapter 32).
I took my findings to Luz Lopez at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She and others had been documenting ICE abuses against the Cameroonian population during their prolonged and unnecessary incarceration (Chapters 31-32). Luz arranged for us to meet with Fatma, who agreed that my findings bore proof of further illegality and impunity behind the impenetrable ICE facade of “keeping the nation secure.” Legal action was warranted, the two lawyers felt. But we could not immediately file suit. We had to jump through an administrative hurdle first: it’s called “exercising agency remedy.” That remedy, in the case of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is filing a complaint with the DHS inspector general and/or oversight body against the DHS agency or agency actors alleged to have committed a crime (Chapter 30). That body, in this case, was the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties — one of the twenty-two agencies and offices hiding like a Matryoshka doll within DHS.
We prepared to drop The WRAP complaint on the anniversary of the first Death Plane: October 13-14, 2021. Our action would kick off a week of DC-based events dedicated to raising awareness about the multiple violent causes of forced displacement in Cameroon while advocating for Temporary Protected Status for Cameroonian asylum seekers already in the US.
Once in the nation’s capital, I met my now-friend, Crossing the Line story collaborator (Chapters 25, 8, 6), and Spanish-English translator, Rainer Rodriguez, at the 14th Street and V, NW, location of Busboys and Poets, a bookstore, restaurant, and event space with a peace and social-justice focus.
A refugee from Cuba, Ray had arrived at the US southern border just as Trump & Co threw down the gauntlet of zero tolerance, leading to family separation and their obsessive erection of physical, bureaucratic, and xenophobic walls against, in UN terminology, “the world’s most vulnerable people.” Ray had fallen victim first to their practice of metering asylum requests (Chapters 2-4), then to the Migrant “Protection” Protocols — which didn’t protect anyone at all (Chapters 5-8, 23-28). Trapped in a volunteer-supported, ad hoc tent encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, from early 2019 (Chapters 5-8), Ray had become an integral member of the refugee community thanks to his professional skills as a teacher, translator, and interpreter. This is where we became first acquainted. Now we were breaking bread north of the line for the first time. We had much to celebrate: Ray was en route to receiving asylum in the US and I had just received a publishing contract from She Writes Press.
“When your book comes out, you should launch it here,” Ray said.
Fast-forward to Summer 2024
On July 7, I was back at the same Busboys and Poets on the eve of the climax event of Phase I of my nationwide book tour — what my friends Kate Scott & Tony Heath had taken to calling the Beacon of Hope Book Tour. [For information about Phase II of the tour, see note below]. Even better: Ray would be on stage with me. So would another new friend and story collaborator, Samuel Temple-Cole, originally from Cameroonian.
Not gonna lie: the first time I laid eyes on the Busboys and Poets event space, I was overwhelmed. It’s a big room! There’s a stage and a professional sound system. Rather than rows of chairs, dining tables accommodating sixty to seventy people fill the space, with wait staff on hand to serve dinner and drinks discretely during programs and presentations.
This was the real deal! Any speaker’s dream come true!
But would I be able to pull in a big enough crowd to fill the place and avoid embarrassment?
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I needn’t have worried. Sam, Ray, and I filled the house. My anxiety gave way to exhilaration within minutes of the doors opening. As our audience tucked into dinners from B&P’s extensive menu of delicious offerings, I offered my intro, then transitioned one at a time into two short readings. Each was selected to cue up first Ray, then Sam, in a facilitated discussion, during which I asked them both the same three questions based on the same three themes:
- Backstory:
Where are you from? What did you flee? And why did you choose the United States? - Betrayal:
What did you expect you would experience on arrival? What actually happened? Can you recall that first WTF moment when you realized your Beacon of Hope was not all that? - Lived Experience under ICE:
- Ray: Tell us what it was like to live under the:
- Migrant “Protection” Protocol regime;
- MPP Kangaroo Court process; and
- inside the US asylum adjudication system.
- Sam: Tell us what it is like to live under ICE
- in physical detention;
- in virtual detention; and
- inside the US asylum adjudication system.
- Ray: Tell us what it was like to live under the:
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Thanks again to Madison Manning for hosting such a great event. Thanks to Madison Stevens, too, for the great pics!
The follow-up Q&A with the packed audience of folks mostly unknown to me was better than I ever hoped, with all of the Q’s directed at Ray and Sam, allowing me to recede into the background. Despite having experienced, first-hand, the worst that humankind is capable of, in their countries of origin as well as in the US, both men exemplify the best side of humanity. Ray believes he is a kinder person today after having been forced to live in places closer to hell than purgatory. Both men find daily solace in listening to their better angels. Sam stressed that the power of hope got him through the darkest of times — it kept his faith alive.
“As long as I had hope,” Sam said in so many words, “I could make myself survive another day.”
In their words, reflections, authenticity, ability for forgiveness, daily actions in service of others, and positive good vibes, Ray and Sam exude the human potential for human compassion and resilience. They made each and every person present grateful to be alive and ready to live by their example. They exuded all the reasons why all nations, especially the Land of Immigrants and so-called Beacon of Hope, should embrace newcomers to our shores and fold them in arms of welcome.
One participating Crossing the Line story collaborator, Michael Seifert (Chapters 2, 24, 25), had this to say:
“What an astonishingly lovely event. Thank you so so much for the gift of all of the hard hard work you have done to lift up a light on the world of these good people! Wow.”
No one, least of all me, wanted the evening to end. Thankfully, our B&P host, Madison Manning, let us linger long after the event space was due to close. We wrapped up the night in the restaurant at a long table in the company of several unexpected and very special guests…. Cameroon Advocacy Network sister and fellow researcher, Lauren Seibert of Human Rights Watch, as well as a couple of passengers of the two infamous 2020 Death Planes and their families.
Behind the Scenes
Starting just weeks after Crossing the Line went to press and continuing throughout the Beacon of Hope Book Tour until mere days before the event at Busboys and Poets, 27 of the 83 individuals we’d been advocating for had been approved to return to the USA to restart their asylum claims. Due to the preponderance of evidence we were able to bring forth — kicked off, in part, by the complaint filed by Fatma’s Texas A&M law clinic (and me) in October 2021; and further supported by a Human Rights Watch February 2022 report penned by Lauren (Chapter 33) — even agency top brass couldn’t deny that US laws had been broken and human rights violations committed by ICE agents acting with impunity.
Among the individuals there to support Sam, Ray, and me that night was one gentleman who had been deported in retaliation for leading a hunger strike to protest being locked up during the coronavirus pandemic.
Another fine person there by our sides had been immobilized in The WRAP in a posture defined by the UN as “positional torture,” then refouled (returned to harm) by agents acting on behalf of the US government.
“Tikem” and “Godswill” are now safe, after seven long years during which they were arrested and tortured by the Cameroonian government, made to make the long trek overground through the Darién Gap, Central American, and Mexican gauntlets in pursuit of freedom, arrested and tortured by the US government, then made to survive another nearly four years on the run, living in hiding (Chapters 27, 31-33).
Maddeningly, frustratingly, horrifyingly, ICE’s egregious, violent, and criminal use of The WRAP goes on. Why? Because the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties has no power to stop it (Chapters 30-33).
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It was an unforgettable climax to the 18-event, 8-city tour introducing Crossing the Line to the world. Phase II of the Beacon of Hope Book Tour begins September 17 — see New York schedule below — and continues up to and beyond November 5, Election Day. Because first, we have to make sure Trump & Co and their Project 2025 are roundly denied another crack at their dogged democracy take-down. Then, we need to hold the Harris-Walz administration’s feet to the fire, because Democrats have not been any better, historically, on this issue.
Our first demands, according to Ray, Sam, and my audience at Busboys and Poets Books must be to:
- End the for-profit imprisonment of peace-seeking people, forever;
- Update our asylum eligibility criteria to reflect the world we now live in — one beset by climate breakdown and forever wars; and
- Restore the asylum system to working order once more and people it with fair-minded judges with a humanitarian focus, not rabid law & order racists trained to argue for expulsion — like Scott Laragy (Chapter 30)
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