Subterms
A ‘Reclaim These Streets’ protest outside Cardiff Bay police station on 15 March. The Labour party announced it would oppose the government’s plan to give police greater powers to crack down on peaceful protest.
Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty More
If Donald Trump’s presidency was a lesson in how symbolic acts of cruelty can be used to consolidate power, then his successors are trying to demonstrate that the same is true for benevolence. In just over a month, the Biden-Harris administration has issued a flurry of new directives aimed at reversing some of the worst aspects of the former president’s immigration policy.Biden has declared an end to the travel restrictions imposed on numerous Muslim-majority countries, and committed to both reviving and expanding the US refugee resettlement scheme. The administration has presented sweeping new immigration reforms to Congress, which if passed would offer a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people, promised a moratorium on deportations in most instances, and announced a plan to reunite children and parents torn apart by the grotesque family separation policy. On Friday, the US began allowing asylum seekers to cross its southern border for the first time since Trump’s “remain in Mexico” initiative was launched in January 2019.Will the reforms go further than merely reversing those of the previous president? Some of the measures, such as a request last week that officials use the term “noncitizen” in place of “alien” when referring to immigrants, indicate that this is as much about a shift in tone as about substantial changes in policy. But others could have wide-reaching global effects. On 4 February, Biden ordered a report on the impact of climate migration, including a study of “options for protection and resettlement of individuals displaced directly or indirectly from climate change”.This official acknowledgement that climate change forces people to leave their homes is unprecedented – at least for the US, which is the world’s largest historical polluter. “I never thought that this would be a part of any American president’s priorities, especially within the first 30 days of their administration,” said Kayly Ober of the US-based NGO Refugees International, expressing the surprise shared by many climate policy experts.Calculating the number of people displaced by climate change is tricky, since people can move for a variety of reasons, and the subject is prone to alarmist predictions. Of the estimated 24 million people forced to leave their homes by extreme weather in 2019, most stayed within their country of residence. But there is currently no coherent international framework for protecting those who cross borders due to climate change: refugee law only deals with people fleeing persecution or war.Trump has already shown how the US can drag the rest of the world downwards in terms of humanitarian standards: his choking-off of refugee resettlement, for instance, was part of a wider decline. Last year, according to the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), was the worst on record for resettlement. The situation was made worse by the pandemic, but the UN was already warning in 2019 about low resettlement rates. If the US revives such schemes, and expands them to address the realities of the 21st century, then other countries may be encouraged or persuaded to follow suit.Yet the fact that a liberal president currently occupies the White House is no reason to abandon our critical faculties. As the climate migration expert Alex Randall notes, Biden’s report, which is due in six months’ time, is being produced by his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Will this security-focused framing dispel or encourage the xenophobic responses to climate change that are emerging in various parts of the world?According to the Center for American Progress, there is already a renewed effort among US conservatives to link environmental damage to immigration, while some prominent far-right parties elsewhere are attempting to give their nationalism a green hue. In 2019, Marine Le Pen launched an election campaign in France by promising that a “Europe of nations” could become the world’s first “ecological civilisation”. Borders, claimed her party’s chief spokesperson, “are the environment’s greatest ally”.This points to a more fundamental question, which is whether to address a migration “crisis” by making a humanitarian exception to the existing system of border control, or by rethinking the principles on which the system exists. Formal refugee resettlement programmes, for instance, make a huge difference to the lives of people who benefit from them, yet less than 1% of those registered by the UNHCR are resettled each year.Many refugees who cross borders do so via informal routes, at risk of death and injury, and often to the displeasure of the governments that receive them. Look, for instance, at the way the British government is creating increasingly harsh conditions for asylum seekers who arrive in the UK under their own initiative. Biden’s proposals contain admirable rhetoric about the need to address “root causes” of migration – but Europe’s recent history shows us how, under xenophobic pressure, this noble-minded language can be used to adorn schemes whose ultimate effect is to keep people out, at considerable human cost.Indeed, so does the recent history of the US, where the new moratorium on deportations has already met judicial resistance. In a new book, Border & Rule, the scholar and activist Harsha Walia reminds us that Trump’s cruelty sat atop foundations laid by previous presidents. From the 1990s onwards, there was an increasing effort to criminalise unwanted migration and accelerate border security measures. In 2014, writes Walia, under Obama’s presidency – in which Biden, of course, served as vice president – about half of all federal arrests were immigration-related. A similar process has been under way in most advanced economies: Walia makes a persuasive argument that we should see this not as a domestic policy issue, but as part of a global system in which border control, alongside military and economic policy, is a way for wealthy countries to maintain their power.There is a risk that this wider context induces a kind of paralysis: what’s the point of changing anything if you can’t change everything? But the reason Biden is able to take these bold-sounding steps now is because of the space created by ordinary people who resisted Trump’s crackdowns and brought their political demands to bear on the Democrats in the run-up to last year’s election. They didn’t wait for a president’s permission to demand better – and, despite the change of leadership, there’s no reason to stop now. More
At Sierra Vista Ranch in Arizona near the Mexican border, Troy McDaniel is warming up his helicopter. McDaniel, tall and slim in a tan jumpsuit, began taking flying lessons in the 80s, and has since logged 2,000 miles in the air. The helicopter, a cosy, two-seater Robinson R22 Alpha is considered a work vehicle and used to monitor the 640-acre ranch, but it’s clear he relishes any opportunity to fly. “We will have no fun at all,” he deadpans.McDaniel and his wife, Melissa Owen, bought their ranch and the 100-year-old adobe house that came with it in 2003. Years before, Owen began volunteering at the nearby Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and fell in love with the beauty and natural diversity of the area, as well as the quiet of their tiny town. That all changed last July when construction vehicles and large machinery started “barrelling down the two-lane state road”, says Owen.Once work on President Donald Trump’s border wall began, construction was rapid. Sasabe, a sleepy border town, located over an hour from the nearest city of Tucson, was transformed into a construction site. “I don’t think you could find a single person in Sasabe who is in favour of this wall,” Owen says.The purpose of our helicopter trip today is to see the rushed construction work occurring just south of the couple’s house, as contractors race to finish sections of the border wall before Trump leaves office. Viewed from high above the Arizona desert, in the windless bubble of the cockpit, this new section of wall stretches across the landscape like a rust-coloured scar. McDaniel guides us smoothly over hills and drops into canyons, surveying the beauty of the landscape. Here, as on much of the border, the 30ft barrier does not go around; it goes over – stubbornly ploughing through cliffs, up steep mountainsides, and between once-connected communities.“That was already a pretty good barrier,” McDaniel says of the steep, unscalable cliff in front of us. The bulldozed path of Trump’s wall creeps up over the mountain’s west side, but on the other side of the cliff there is no wall, just a large gap. As with many areas on the border, the wall here is being built in a piecemeal fashion. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, there are 37 ongoing projects, of which only three are set to be completed this month; others have completion dates as far away as June 2022.In August, at a virtual press conference with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Joe Biden told reporters that “there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration”. The 37 existing construction sites, in various stages of completion, are likely to be shut down.Yet he will have to formulate a more complex policy than simple suspension. Many of the private contractors building the wall have clauses in their contracts that will trigger large payouts if the government simply stops construction. There are also ongoing legal cases brought by private landowners from whom the government seized land. The exact nature of these obligations may only be clear to Biden once he takes office.In the meantime, Trump has accelerated building in the wake of the election, with crews working flat out, late into the night. Throughout December and into January, mountainsides were exploded with dynamite and large portions of desert bulldozed, to make way for a wall that may not be finished in time.For the past four years, I have been living in New Mexico, travelling in the borderlands and documenting the ongoing impact of the wall on communities and the environment.“They started working nights six weeks ago,” says photographer John Kurc, who has been documenting construction in the remote Guadalupe Canyon in Arizona since October last year. “It’s been nonstop ever since.”This is not about protecting America. It’s about protecting President Trump’s own interestsVerlon Jose, former vice-chair of the Native American Tohono O’odham Nation, tells me he has seen the wall plough through his ancestral homeland. “We are caretakers of this land. We are responsible for these things. Has anyone ever asked for permission from the local folks to do the construction? This is about President Donald Trump. It’s not about protecting America. It’s about protecting his own interests.”When construction stops, there will be large gaps in the new wall. In some places it will join up with older barriers that the Trump administration deemed inadequate; in others it will finish abruptly. “They work as fast as they can to build walls that will just end,” says McDaniel, as his helicopter circles back toward their property over saguaro-studded hillsides just north of the Mexican border. We drop altitude and approach the landing strip – a patch of dirt just off the road – whipping up a small dust storm as we touch the ground.***After four years of daily scandals, and the shocking scenes in Washington DC last week, it’s easy to forget that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 with one signature policy: to build a wall. That was the call echoed at his rallies, the embodiment of Trump’s hardline approach to immigration and his purported “America First” ideology. Trump claimed the wall would address an invasion of undesirable migrants, “bad hombres”, a nationalist rhetoric that resonated with his base. During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order that included a policy for “the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border”.Construction began in 2019, mostly replacing existing fences, vehicle barriers, and other border structures, as well as unwalled sections of the border. The bollard wall, Trump’s barrier of choice, consists of a series of vertical steel posts set in concrete, with small gaps in between. While in some places it reaches a height of 30ft, it is less of a wall and more of an imposing metal fence.According to Kenneth Madsen, an associate professor in the department of geography at Ohio State University, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has waived 84 laws and statutes – many enacted specifically to protect the nation’s most treasured cultural and ecological sites – in order to expedite construction.Dozens of environmental and public health laws were brushed aside to build walls through parks and wildlife areas, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge and Coronado National Memorial. “It has brought devastation to the environment and the communities of the borderlands,” says Scott Nicol, author of a 2018 report for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) about the impact of the wall, and a resident of the Rio Grande valley in Texas.Nicol believes the wall’s charted course has been determined by ease rather than efficacy. Construction has been much busier on federally owned land, not because that’s where there are likely to be more border crossings, but because building on private property is a lengthy process. “Texas has the most border but the least wall mileage to date because the Texas borderlands are mostly in private hands,” says Nicol.According to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, 452 miles of border wall have been constructed under the Trump administration, at an estimated cost of $15bn, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in US history. In September 2019, Trump promised to build between 450 and 500 miles of wall, so he has reached this goal – even if the vast majority of it is replacing existing barriers.On Tuesday, days after the violent insurrection at the White House, Trump made a final visit to the border in Texas to celebrate reaching this target. During a short speech, he skirted any responsibility for the capital siege, and instead remarked on his successes in halting illegal immigration and securing the border.“When I took office, we inherited a broken, dysfunctional and open border,” he said. “We reformed our immigration system and achieved the most secure southern border in US history.”Has it had any impact on immigration? According to attorney David Donatti, from the ACLU of Texas, the answer is no. In recent months, according to CBP data, the number of people trying to cross has increased. “The wall as a whole is unlikely to have any discernible impact,” says Donatti. “In a race to construct, the administration is building where it’s easier as opposed to where most people cross.”And while the wall may be an impressive barrier, it is far from impregnable. Just after Christmas, Nicol visited a new section in the Rio Grande valley between Texas and Mexico and found numerous ladders scattered on the ground. “You can always go over,” he says.You can also go through. John Kurc started using drones to photograph and video the construction of the wall. The last time he was in the border town of Sonoyta, Mexico, he saw two young men with “yellow, handheld angle grinders” cutting through the wall while a lookout with a radio watched for Border Patrol. “They would put the section back with a special bonding agent and then use paint that oxidizes the same colour as the bollards,” says Kurc. “Then they just go in and out.”Gil Kerlikowske, the Obama-appointed former commissioner of the CBP, says there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for border security: “There are places where the environment is difficult and so remote you don’t need any barrier at all.” In these areas, surveillance and detection technologies would be more useful and cost-efficient, he argues. “It is such an unbelievably complex problem. When someone proposes a simple solution to a complex problem, you can be sure that’s the wrong solution.”***That’s not to say Trump’s wall has had no impact. Back on the ranch, cameras set up by Melissa Owen have captured passing wildlife – mountain lions and javelina, pig-like mammals, the skulls of which can also be found around the house. “There were no environmental surveys, no groundwater surveys, none of that,” says Owen. Once contractors arrived in town last summer, they began “pumping enormous amounts of water out of the ground” in order to mix concrete for the border wall’s foundations.Residents in Sasabe began complaining of reduced water pressure. At San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, groundwater pumping for concrete began draining a crucial wetland and endangering four threatened species of fish. Similar concerns were raised when the Quitobaquito Springs at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, home to the endangered desert pupfish began to dry out as contractors pumped water from the ancient aquifer that fed it. “That’s our water – that’s what we depend on,” says Owen, looking out towards arid ranchland that is suffering from a long drought.We had three different jaguars in 2016 – we haven’t seen signs of any since construction beganMyles Traphagen, borderlands coordinator of the Wildlands Network conservation group, has called Trump’s wall the “single most damaging project” to the ecology of the mountainous Sky Islands region and the animals that call it home – especially the jaguar, which has made a remarkable comeback in the US after being hunted to extinction by the late 1960s.“We had three different jaguars in 2015 and 2016, which hadn’t happened since the 1930s,” says Chris Bugbee, a senior researcher at Conservation CATalyst, an organisation dedicated to the world’s 38 wild cat species.“If this border wall hadn’t started, we expected a female to eventually arrive and have breeding jaguars again,” adds Aletris Neils, Conservation CATalyst’s executive director.The jaguar is one of numerous species – such as the endangered ocelot and the Mexican gray wolf – found in a region that extends from south-western New Mexico into western Arizona and far down into Mexico. If current border wall construction is completed, says Traphagen, “93% of jaguar habitat will have been walled off”.Only males have been seen in the US since the 60s. They have huge ranges and some travel north where there is plenty to eat, before returning south to find a mate. There is currently one jaguar (whose location cannot be shared due to poaching concerns) on the US side, cut off from Mexico because of the wall.Bugbee has spent years tracking the famous “El Jefe” jaguar, one of the few sighted recently in the US, with his dog Mayke. “We haven’t seen signs of any jaguars since construction began,” he tells me when we meet at the Coronado National Forest, where he previously tracked the cat. A mile or so away, construction workers have been blasting and bulldozing over the steep Montezuma Pass, where another jaguar, known as Yo’oko, once roamed.Owen and McDaniel are far from open-border liberals. The entrance to their ranch has a sign that reads: “Border Patrol always welcome”. Owen’s two horses, Rocker and Kiowa, are retired Border Patrol horses – “the best”, she says of their temperament. In her early years on the ranch, Owen says, undocumented migrants and smugglers were coming across the border in large numbers. She would frequently encounter migrants on her property. One morning someone broke into her house. “I don’t want it to go back to then,” she says, but adds that the economic downturn of 2008 has slowed immigration considerably. “No one wants a secure border more than I,” she says. “But a 30ft-tall, poorly constructed barrier is not the answer. It’s a campaign gimmick. My neighbourhood is being destroyed because a megalomaniac wants to pacify his supporters.”During his election campaign, Trump claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall. Once he was in office, Congress provided some $1.37bn a year for construction, but each year the president demanded more, ultimately declaring a national emergency in order to divert military funds to pay for the wall. It’s estimated by the US Army Corps of Engineers that Biden will save about $2.6bn if he stops construction on the border wall in his first day in office.Trump, and some within CBP, have maintained that the wall is a crucial means of halting smuggling. “Illegal drug and human smuggling activities have decreased in those areas where barriers are deployed. Illegal cross-border traffic has also shifted to areas with inferior legacy barriers or no barriers at all,” said a DHS spokesperson in a recent email to the Guardian.Kerlikowske, who also served as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy between 2009 and 2014, admits that drug trafficking is a problem. However, he points out that the vast majority of illicit substances, such as fentanyl, cocaine and heroin, are smuggled through legal ports of entry where elaborate walls and security systems already exist. “During my time as commissioner, I met with hundreds of border patrol agents. No one in the border patrol says we really need a wall,” he says.As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areasDonatti from the ACLU of Texas says there is little evidence that walls deter either drugs or undocumented immigration, which is being driven primarily by so-called push factors (war, poverty, desperation) in other countries. “The US federal government has tried to study this several times and has never found support that a border wall stops the flow of undocumented immigration,” he says.One thing border walls are effective at is increasing the number of migrant deaths. As the US has walled off more of its border, the risk to migrants crossing illegally has increased. Since 1998, around 7,000 people have died along the US-Mexico border, the majority in Arizona’s rural deserts and, in recent years, the Rio Grande valley. “As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areas,” says Donatti.“It’s a humanitarian disaster,” agrees Eddie Canales, of the South Texas Human Rights Center, who has spent the past decade operating hundreds of water stations in the Rio Grande valley in Texas to save migrants. “We do what we can,” Canales told the Guardian in early 2020. “But people keep dying.” The wall funnels people into more dangerous crossing points, where physical barriers do not yet exist. Summer temperatures in the Arizona desert are brutal; 2020 became the deadliest year since 2010 for those who crossed the border there.***“It’s hard for people to understand what this means to us, as O’odham and Native Americans. What it means to us as the original indigenous peoples of this land,” says Verlon Jose.When I visit Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a pristine tract of Sonoran desert, earlier this year, contractors are busy dynamiting Monument Hill, a sacred mountain and burial site for the Tohono O’odham people. Uprooted saguaros, the huge, tree-like cacti sacred to the tribe, dot the path of the wall. “It was like, ‘Tell me where your grandparents live, and I’ll put a wall through there,’” says Jose.“In certain areas, we won’t be able to continue our traditional practices,” says Jose, whose tribal members span both sides of the border. “We spent billions of dollars on the wall. Why don’t we invest it in our border cities and towns?”According to Norma Herrera, a border resident from McAllen, Texas, the wall’s $15bn price tag is an insult to one of the county’s most impoverished regions, where critical infrastructure is often lacking. This issue was laid bare during the pandemic, when places such as the Rio Grande valley in Texas, a centre of border wall construction, was devastated by Covid. Hospitals reached capacity, deaths mounted, and all the while, the wall continued to rise.“We had more deaths in the region than the entire state,” says Herrera, community organiser at the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, which advocates for marginalised groups in the area. “To see the wall going up, to see resources used on useless steel and concrete, it’s senseless.”According to Donatti, whose parents originally emigrated from Argentina to the US, the wall should be seen in the context of broader exclusion policies – such as the Remain in Mexico programme enacted by Trump, under which asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry are returned to Mexico to wait for their US immigration proceedings. “It’s this idea that there is a fundamental Americanness, and either you’re inside, or you’re out,” he says.That idea was evident in late 2019, when I visited a shelter in Tijuana. The two-storey building in the neighbourhood of Benito Juárez was packed with families, with mattresses sprawled over every inch of open floor. At that time in Tijuana, nearly 10,000 asylum seekers were waiting for their immigration hearings after being turned back at the border and sent to one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.Many are hopeful that under the Biden administration the approach to migrants and the borderlands will change; that policies such as Remain in Mexico will be undone; and even that sections of the border wall will be removed. A week after inauguration day, a coalition of groups across the borderlands will begin a monitoring project in order to assess the damage, and to see what needs to be done. Some hope certain sections can be removed in order to reconnect critical habitats and communities.Verlon Jose of the Tohono O’odham has a “sliver of hope” that some of the walls will come down. “I believe Biden will not build another inch,” he adds.Others are not so sure. “Optimism? No,” says Donatti of the prospect of the wall coming down. “He hasn’t committed to as much. But there is a strong coalition along the border that will be fighting for it.”John Kurc, who has spent thousands of hours watching the destruction of Guadalupe Canyon, sees the scale of the challenge. “The Trump administration has caused so much damage to these environments,” he says, peering through a set of binoculars as a crane hoists up an isolated section of wall, with huge gaps on each side. “We have a lot of work to do.” More
For the first time, a senior Trump administration official who helped implement family separation has condemned the hardline immigration policy, which made it possible for the government to take more than 3,000 children, including infants, from their parents at the US-Mexico border in 2018.In response to a damning report published on Thursday by the US justice department’s internal watchdog on the “zero-tolerance” policy, which made family separation possible, the former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein said the policy “should have never been proposed or implemented”.The justice department’s Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) long-awaited report said department leadership knew the policy would result in children being separated from their families and that the former US attorney general Jeff Sessions “demonstrated a deficient understanding of the legal requirements related to the care and custody of separated children”.“We concluded that the Department’s single-minded focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations,” the report said.The OIG said justice department leadership “did not effectively coordinate” with the relevant agencies before implementing zero-tolerance, despite being aware of the challenges created by increasing prosecutions of adult asylum seekers under the policy.In a conference call in May 2018, Sessions told prosecutors: “We need to take away children,” according to notes taken by people on the call and provided to the OIG.Rosenstein, who publicly denounced the policy for the first time on Thursday, told the OIG he had known the zero-tolerance policy would result in family separations. He also told investigators he had not been involved with the formulation of the policy and had received reassurances about it that he now believed were wrong.In July 2020, the Guardian reported that Rosenstein had made comments in a conference call with US attorneys charged with implementing the policy that in effect meant that no child was too young to be separated from their parents.The call came after US attorneys on the south-west border had repeatedly raised concerns about how zero-tolerance was supposed to be operated. A month after the policy had been in place, to help attorneys, a list of questions was drafted for DHS and HHS, which included: “How does DHS deal with infants?”At that point, it was clear no agency had a master list of separated children.In a statement provide to the Guardian on Thursday, Rosenstein said he and his colleagues at the justice department “faced unprecedented challenges” compared with work he had done as a US attorney under previous presidential administrations.“Since leaving the Department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero-tolerance immigration policy,” Rosenstein said. “It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better.”Sessions, who resigned in November 2018, announced the zero-tolerance policy in April 2018. Facing intense pressure nationally and abroad, the Trump administration stopped mass family separations in June 2018, though asylum-seeking families continue to be separated today at a smaller scale.Family separation, which legal experts and doctors said constituted torture, was supported by multiple federal agencies.The homeland security department (DHS) separated families at the border and detained the parents, the health department eventually took custody of children separated from their parents and the justice department leadership provided the legal framework that made separations possible.The justice department OIG report confirms earlier watchdog reports from the other agencies’ monitors, which found inadequate tracking systems were in place.A January 2019 report from the health department OIG found the Trump administration might have separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border for up to a year before family separation was a publicly known practice.The lead attorney on an ongoing family separation lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Lee Gelernt, said: “This new report shows just how far the Trump administration was willing to go to destroy these families. Just when you think the Trump administration can’t sink any lower, it does.“The Biden-Harris administration will inherit the legacy of family separation, and we don’t doubt that more horrific details will continue to emerge,” Gelernt said. “We need them to act with urgency – every day without action makes it harder to find and reunite families.”Dick Durbin, a Democratic US senator from Illinois, said he would hold the justice department officials responsible to account as the incoming chair of the US Senate judiciary committee. “Those who planned and executed the zero-tolerance policy will have to live with the knowledge that their cruelty and cowardice are responsible for the scars these children will carry for the rest of their lives,” Durbin said.Despite being the driving force behind the zero-tolerance policy, Sessions refused to be interviewed by OIG investigators.The report said Sessions told US attorneys on the south-west border that families would be quickly prosecuted and reunited, even though doing so was, “in most cases, a practical and legal impossibility”. The former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has repeatedly defended her decision to enforce the zero-tolerance policy, which was announced in April 2018. More
Europe’s dreamers
‘Never give up’: Greek asylum fight is gifted student’s hardest lesson
Amadou Diallo arrived in Greece from west African nearly four years ago.
Composite: Enri Canaj/Magnum
Amadou Diallo fled child labour in an African gold mine. Only by proving his ability to an elite university has he won the right to a future in Europe
‘We want to build a life’: Europe’s paperless young people speak out
by Fahrinisa Campana
Main image:
Amadou Diallo arrived in Greece from west African nearly four years ago.
Composite: Enri Canaj/Magnum
From the stack of books Amadou Diallo took with him last summer to the Greek islands, it was a biography of Frederick Douglass that kept finding its way back to the top. One quote from the 19th-century slavery abolitionist particularly resonated: “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
Diallo was on Sifnos, a holiday destination for cultured Athenians and well-heeled foreign families. An asylum seeker from Guinea, he was working long hours in a hotel. At night he would read the life stories of great men, wondering what shape his own freedom might take.
Still just 20, the boy who arrived alone from west Africa nearly four years ago has seized every chance given to him. From boutique hotels on fashionably offbeat islands, to a private school where diplomats send their children, he has seen a vision of what Europe has to offer. He has read voraciously and worked hard to educate himself and to belong. But his place in this new world relies on Greece’s asylum process.
Q&A Who are Europe’s dreamers?
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Dreamers is the US term collectively given to young people without legal immigration status who were brought to the US as children. Some young people living in Europe without legal status now also call themselves ‘dreamers’ because their struggle against hostile European migration and asylum policies echoes the US campaign. Between 3.9 and 4.8 million people in Europe are believed to be living without residency permits, about 65% of whom are under 35 years old, according to the Pew Research Center. In the UK, a recent University of Wolverhampton study commissioned by the mayor of London estimated there are 332,000 children and young people living undocumented in the UK, including 106,000 children born in the country. Estimating numbers of undocumented people necessarily involves guesswork – and the methodologies are often criticised – but it is thought there are millions of dreamers across Europe.
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Diallo did not grow up with dreams of leaving Guinea. It was only after his father died that his life pitched into something that could have been imagined by a west African Dickens. Along with his younger brother, he was sent to live with his stepmother, who he says was abusive and sold him to the owner of a gold mine.
His life at the mine was essentially one of forced labour. The first time he tried to escape, he was caught and brutally punished.
Unbowed, he tried again. Locked in with other children, he screamed that there was a fire. The guards unlocked the door and in the chaos he managed to slip away.
He crossed the border into Mali and took the route north that would eventually lead him to Turkey. From there, he caught a boat to the Greek island of Lesbos. When the 16-year-old finally reached Athens, two months after leaving Guinea, he was spotted by an aid worker who brought him to a children’s shelter run by the Home Project, a non-profit organisation. It focuses on sheltering lone children who, like Diallo, came in their thousands and ended up surviving on the streets, in camps or detention centres. As an unaccompanied minor he was classed as vulnerable and granted temporary protection.
Through the Home Project he met Anna-Maria Kountouri, an immigration lawyer. She explains that minors have a race against time to gain legal status to remain in Europe, as when they reach 18 it is more difficult.
To secure his future in Europe, Diallo needed the Greek authorities to accept his asylum claim. But the rejection rate in Greece for unaccompanied minors has risen sharply in recent years under new hardline asylum laws. Children whose cases are rejected are not deported but coming of age sweeps away that protection.
Between June 2013 and January 2020 a total of 7,558 asylum applications from unaccompanied minors were processed in Greece, of which 63% were rejected. Of the 186 applications processed in January 2020, 71% were rejected. More
The title is apt for a documentary about the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who got their always combative existence stepped up a notch with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Now they found themselves fighting with the White House itself. This film features an Aaron Sorkin-style walk-and-talk tour around the ACLU offices in Brooklyn, New York, with its array of talented lawyers and heroic idealists.It concentrates on four cases fought by them: the right of a migrant to an abortion, the right of transgender people to serve in the military, the right of migrants not to be separated from their children, and the right of US residents not to answer a new census question about whether they are US citizens. This apparently innocuous query was cunningly designed to reduce the ostensible population size (and federal aid budgets while creating space for tax cuts etc) as migrants fearfully decline to answer.It also, insidiously, is intended to start a media row on this very point and crank up a value-for-money Kulturkampf against the alien outsider, a census question costing so much less than a wall. It should also be said – and this film could and should have said it – that the grotesque policy of separating migrants from their children was specifically designed to create a spasm of horror in the media (and the ACLU) for its deterrent effect, certainly, but mostly, yet again, to provide raw material for the Fox News Theatre of Cruelty.This film is a lively and watchable account of the full-tilt battle being fought by the ACLU, with its chief lawyer, Lee Gelernt, at the helm, a man addicted to Diet Coke and stress, at one point heading to emotional meltdown as he realises he doesn’t know where or how to plug in his smartphone charger. The film’s structural flaw is that it doesn’t quite know how to handle the most controversial moment in ACLU history: sticking toughly to the principle of free speech for all, it defended the right of racist Charlottesville protesters to rally in 2017, an event that led to a fatality. Maybe the whole film should have been about that one case. Well, the census-question case gives this its rousing finale. It creates, however, a possibly misleading impression of victory.• The Fight is available on digital platforms from 31 July. More
CDC recently issued order encouraging immediate deportation of non-citizens without valid documents, citing obscure quarantine law Coronavirus – latest US updates Coronavirus – latest global updates See all our coronavirus coverage Mauricio, 66, from Honduras looks at a brochure on Covid-19 in Ciudad Juárez. A US policy that seeks to expel migrants because of the […] More
