Where does ICE deport a stateless immigrant to? Wherever they want, apparently. In this segment of Mehdi Unfiltered, Mehdi speaks to Ward Sakeik, a stateless Palestinian whom the Trump administration tried to illegally deport not once, but twice.
“‘I can send you to China, I can send you to Somalia, I could send you to Congo, I can send you wherever I want to send you,’” Sakeik recalled one ICE official telling her during 140 days in detention, even though she is protected by a Deferred Enforced Departure order that makes removing her from the United States illegal.
Sakeik’s attorney, Maria Kari, says “Americans need to wake up to the lie that ICE is taking ‘criminals’ off the street because they're not. As of June, 70% of the people that ICE has arrested had no criminal history, just like Ward,” and adds that ICE took extra steps to make sure the attempts at deporting Sakeik would go unimpeded.
In one attempt, ICE tried to deport Sakeik in the middle of the night to the border of Israel, of all places. They got as far as bringing her to the tarmac before calling it off as a result of Israel’s bombing of Iran. “Why do you put somebody on a Boeing in the middle of the night? That's because their family's likely not awake, their lawyers likely not around, and the courts are not there to give you emergency relief. So all that is happening by design,” says Kari.
Paid subscribers can watch the full interview above to hear Sakeik detail the conditions she was detained under, how some ICE officials told her she shouldn’t have been detained in the first place, and whether she could be detained yet again.
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