As the United States prepares to welcome tens of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing war, the country continues to deport scores of African and Caribbean refugees back to unstable and violent countries where they face torture, rape, arbitrary arrest and other abuses.
“They don’t care about the black man,” said Wilfred Tebah, who fled Cameroon during the current conflict, referring to US politicians. “The difference is really clear. They know what is happening there and have decided to close their eyes and ears”.
The benefits for Ukrainians are reminiscent of protests against the rapid expulsion of Haitian refugees who crossed the border last summer with no opportunity to seek asylum, apart from the cold reception that refugees from Africa and the Middle East have faced in Western Europe compared to the enthusiastic reception these countries have given to displaced Ukrainians.
In March, when President Joe Biden announced that he was opening the doors to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, granting Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to another 30,000 already in the United States and stopping the deportation of Ukrainians, two Democratic legislators used the occasion to ask for humanitarian considerations similar for Haitians.
“There are reasons to extend the same level of compassion,” Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Mondaire Jones wrote to the government, noting that more than 20,000 Haitians have been deported despite continued instability following the assassination of Haiti’s president and a powerful earthquake. .
Cameroonian advocates have also stepped up their calls for humanitarian relief, protesting outside the Washington residence of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the offices of prominent congressmen this month.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Cameroonians have been displaced in recent years by a civil war between their Francophone government and Anglophone separatists, attacks by the terrorist group Boko Haram and other conflicts.
Human Rights Watch said in a February report that many Cameroonians deported from the United States suffered persecution and human rights violations upon return.
Tebah, a senior member of the American Cameroonian Council, an activist group organizing protests this month, said that is a fate he hopes to avoid.
A native of the country’s English-speaking northwest, he said he was branded a separatist and apprehended by the government because of his activism as a college student. Tebah says he managed to escape, as many of his compatriots have, by flying to Latin America, traveling overland to the US-Mexico border and applying for asylum in 2019.
“I will be imprisoned, tortured and killed if I am deported,” he said. “I am very afraid. As a human being, my life matters too.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of TPS and other humanitarian programs, declined to respond to complaints of racism in US immigration policy. He also declined to say whether he was considering granting TPS to Cameroonians or other Africans, saying in a written statement only that he would continue to “monitor conditions in various countries.”
He pointed out, however, that he has recently issued TPS designations for Haiti, Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan, apart from more than 75,000 Afghans residing in the United States after the return of the Taliban to power in their country. Haitians are among the largest beneficiaries of TPS, with more than 40,000 currently in status.
Other countries with TPS are Myanmar, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen, and most of the nearly 320,000 with the status come from El Salvador.
Lisa Parisio, who helped launch Catholics Against Racism in Immigration, says the program could easily protect millions more refugees fleeing danger, but it has historically been underutilized and politicized.
TPS, which provides work permits and deportation protection for up to 18 months, has no limit to how many countries or people can be placed in the program, says Parisio, who is the director of advocacy for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network.
But former President Donald Trump, in his efforts to restrict immigration, reduced TPS, allowing designations for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea to expire.
Although programs like TPS provide fundamental protections to vulnerable refugees, they can also leave many in legal limbo for years, without providing a path to naturalization, said Karla Morales, a 24-year-old Salvadoran who has been in TPS for most of her life. lifetime.
“It is absurd to consider 20 years temporary in this country,” said the nursing student at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “We need validation that the work we do is appreciated and that our lives have value.”
At least in the case of Ukraine, Biden seems motivated by broad foreign policy goals in Europe, not racial bias, says Maria Cristina Garcia, a history professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
But Tom Wong, director of the US Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego, said the racial disparities couldn’t be clearer.
“The United States has responded without hesitation by extending humanitarian protections to predominantly white and European refugees,” he said. “Meanwhile, people of color in Africa, the Middle East and Asia continue to languish.”
Aside from Cameroon, immigrant advocates also argue that refugees from the Congo and Ethiopia should be able to receive humanitarian protections due to their ongoing conflicts, as should Mauritania, where slavery still exists.
And they complain that Ukrainian asylum seekers are exempted from limits set to prevent the spread of COVID-19, while those from other nations are turned away.
“Black pain and black suffering don’t get the same attention,” says Sylvie Bello, founder of the Washington-based American Cameroonian Council. “The same anti-black sentiment that permeates American life permeates American immigration policy.”
Vera Arnot, a Ukrainian living in Boston who is considering applying for TPS, says she didn’t know much about the special status until the war started and wasn’t aware of the concerns of immigrants of color. But the Berklee College of Music student hopes relief will be extended to other deserving nations.
Arnot says TPS would help him find better-paying off-campus work so he doesn’t have to rely on his family for help, when most people in Ukraine have lost their jobs because of the war.
“Ukrainians are not used to depending on others,” he said. “We want to work. We don’t want social help.”
For Tebah, who lives with relatives in Ohio, TPS would make it easier for her to open a bank account, get a driver’s license and look for better employment while she awaits an asylum decision.
“We will continue to beg, to ask,” Tebah said. “We are in danger. We want to emphasize it. And only TPS for Cameroon would help us get out of that danger. It is very necessary.”
With AP information
