Christians, fleeing Islamic Persecution....only to find they have No friend in America, arrested and shackled..Not illegal Aliens...Asylum Seekers. Innocent Christians who are being persecuted for their Religion in an Islamic nation, who present themselves at the US border to ask for Asylum (as the LAW requires) and they are shackled and sent to Panama.
The Work of the LORD in action
Iranian Christians Fled Iran due to religious prosecution. Now the US has deported them to Panama.
A group of Iranian Christians posted a video to Instagram after being flown from the U.S.-Mexico border, where they were seeking asylum, to Panama aboard a U.S. military plane
But these deportation flights trample migrant’s rights and could return some asylum-seekers to dangerous situations, immigrant advocates and attorneys say.
Sitting on a bed in a hotel room surrounded by eight other people, including several children, she explains to the camera that they’re all Iranian Christians who journeyed to the U.S.-Mexico border near Tijuana to seek asylum – then were shackled and flown six hours in a military plane to Panama.
“All of our cases are legitimate,” she says, her eyes burrowing with worry. “I’m a protester in Iran with a record. I can’t go back.”
The woman – later identified as 27-year-old Artemis Ghasemzadeh – was part of a group of Iranian Christians, as well as migrants from Afghanistan, Nepal, China and other countries, who were recently flown from the U.S. to Panama and Costa Rica.
The flights are part of President Donald Trump and his administration’s strategy of outsourcing some of its most challenging deportations and removing as many people as possible who are in the U.S. without permission. On Thursday, the administration took another step designating eight gangs from Latin America as "foreign terrorist organizations," increasing the reach of U.S. law enforcement as they race to deport record number of migrants and deliver on one of Trump's biggest campaign promises.
“This is unprecedented,” Hillary Walsh, an immigration attorney in Phoenix whose office has been in touch with the Iranians in Panama, said of the new flights. “It’s not making asylum law hard – it’s eliminating asylum law.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the deportations, did not respond to a request for comment.
'Cries and horrifying noises'
Ghasemzadeh and the other Iranians traveled through several countries, including Mexico, to reach the U.S.-Mexico border at Tijuana, Walsh said. After they crossed the border, U.S. officials took their passports and other documents and gave them immigration detention wristbands. They were never given “credible fear” interviews, Walsh said, often the first step to determining whether migrants could apply for asylum.The migrants were told detention centers there were full and they were transporting them to Texas, Walsh said. Instead, they were shackled, boarded onto a C-17 military cargo plane and flown to Panama.
“They tied our hands and feet,” Ghasemzadeh says in the video, which, as of Wednesday, had been shared more than 160,000 times. “Women and children were getting sick, fainting … You could hear cries and horrifying noises from the plane.”
As of 2019, there were about 385,000 Iranian immigrants living in the United States, or less than 1 percent of the nearly 45 million immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute. That year, there were approximately 7,000 unauthorized Iranian immigrants, or less than 0.1% of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country.
Iranian Christians present a particularly compelling asylum case, according to immigrant advocates, since the Iranian government prohibits converting from Islam to any religion. Sharia, or Islamic religious law, as interpreted by the government considers conversion from Islam apostasy, a crime punishable by death, according to the U.S. State Department.
The vast majority of Iranians who arrive in the U.S. do so through a third country, often Turkey, and with the proper visas, said Peyman Malaz, chief operating officer of the PARS Equality Center, an L.A.-based advocacy group that helps mostly Persian-speaking migrants.
More Iranians arrive at the border
Over the past four or five months, however, his center has seen an uptick in Iranians arriving at the border who complain that their wait times in third countries are stretching past five or six years, he said. Those who arrive at the border are often the most persecuted and desperate, such as Iranian Christians, he said.Malaz said he was dismayed to hear of the Iranian Christians who were flown to Panama without any process for asylum.
“I was shocked,” he said. “The United States has always been a beacon of hope for refugees. These people are running away from an autocratic government.”
The Iranian Christians were part of a flight of 119 people who arrived in Panama aboard the C-17 on February 12, the first of three flights to arrive in the country the past week, said Tom Cartwright, who tracks deportation flights using publicly available flight records for the advocacy group Witness at the Border. Another flight filled with migrants later landed in Costa Rica.
The last time the U.S. government transported migrants to a third country that was not their country of origin was when immigration officials flew asylum-seekers from Guatemala, Honduras and other countries to southern Mexico under the Biden administration, Cartwright said. Those flights ended in late 2022.
The use of military cargo flights is baffling, he said, since U.S. officials could transport migrants on commercial charter flights for a fraction of the cost. Also, some of the nationalities on the flights, such as Nepal and India, the U.S. could deport directly to their countries of origin rather than pay to take them through a third country, Cartwright said.
You can read More about this story from the HORRIFICALLY bias USA Today at the link below (Link just for you @JTOSU)
