Disappeared to a Foreign Prison

The Trump administration is deporting people to countries they have no ties to, where many are being detained indefinitely or forcibly returned to the places they fled. Sarah Stillman delivers an essential story that one source told her might not even be writable, because of how hard the government is making it to find the people they’re dumping in foreign locations. One of the stolen people Stillman speaks to is Orville Etoria, a Jamaican man who, after living for 50 years in the United States, was sent to Eswatini, an African country he’d never heard of:

“We all expressed the same disconnect from reality in that moment,” Etoria said. He told me that an ICE official had snapped paparazzi-style photographs as he stepped off the plane, still wearing chains. He felt like an unwilling prop in an ad for the Trump Administration. “You could tell it was a charade, all for show, so that they could use it and say, ‘Look what we did,’ ” he said.

“To be honest,” Etoria added, “it helped me imagine how the slaves might have felt, going to another land in shackles and chains—that loneliness, that disconnect, that sense of loss.”