Traps are set to deport by surprise
November 9, 2021
A closed center is home to multiple racist and sexist abuses, whether or not they are provided in the law. One of them, which this article intends to denounce, consists in taking a person by surprise and by force without even informing him/her beforehand of his/her deportation. As a general rule, but not systematically, people about to be deported are notified one or two days before the flight. They are given a ticket with information about the flight and the destination. But the immigration office and the airport police do not always follow this procedure, which makes it difficult to resist.
– On November 5, a Bangladeshi man detained in the 127bis detention center was called to an office where a (misnamed) social worker from the center was present. According to our contacts in the center, it was nothing but a trap. As soon as he entered the room, security men closed the door behind him, quickly took his few belongings from his bed and put him in a car. Witnessing this violent scene, the other inmates didn’t know where he was taken but suspect that this action was intended to evict him by surprise. They are all the more convinced of this because the mobile phone number he had in the center no longer works.
– Another detainee who had been subjected to an expulsion attempt had, upon his return to the center, been called to the social worker’s office. She had warned him that the next attempt would be with an escort and by surprise.
– On November 8, Hafsa suffered the same fate in the closed center of Holsbeek. Fleeing a forced marriage in her country, she had arrived in Belgium. She was detained there, as the (immigration) Office hypocritically refused to recognize the existence of forced marriages in Morocco. She was forcibly taken to Brussels Airport in her pyjamas for an Air Arabia flight to Tangiers to be deported against her will, completely tied up. During her first attempt to be deported (art here ), which she had refused, the police had promised her an escort and a forced deportation in the next few days. This brutal threat was carried out on this sad morning of November 8 without her having been warned beforehand.
The borders have been reopening for several months, and at the same time the expulsions of migrants have resumed. These sudden abduction techniques are in addition to the dehumanizing “means of coercion” used by the police, about which Myria (federal center on migration) sees nothing wrong (see the photo below and the report, p.57 .
The report also indicates that “the execution of repatriations is regulated by an unpublished protocol signed between the OE and the aeronautical police of Brussels National Airport (known by the acronym ‘LPA-BRU-NAT’)”.
Within the closed centers and in the face of the racist methods of the foreigners’ office and the airport police, resistance and solidarity are being organized among the detainees: refusal of the Covid test, hunger strikes, various information given by whistleblowers who are also locked up, etc.
We invite you to regularly consult our Facebook page and our website, where various calls for support are published.
The State does everything to make the migrants it locks up invisible, to undermine their struggles and their support, to prevent them from communicating, from testifying and from making contact with the rest of the world. For it is necessary to dehumanize them in order to be able to use them politically, to make scapegoats of them, concepts like “the transmigrant”.
It is the same with undocumented migrants, for whom the stick (the threat of deportation) and the carrot (the false promise of regularization) are tools systematically used to stifle their struggles for a dignified existence. The false promises of the Beguinage have shown this again recently.
Only a common resistance – in the closed centers and outside the centers, by the precarious victims but also by their supporters – will be able to change things. The balance of power is not to our advantage, but it can change, history is not stingy with surprises when the fight is just!
Gebruikte Dwangmiddelen https://www.myria.be/fr/publications/myriadoc-11-retour-detention-et-eloignement
