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For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.
Last May, the United Kingdom’s Home Office posted footage that showed immigration officers going door to door and marching migrants into a waiting van. “BREAKING,” a caption read, “the first people set to be removed to Rwanda have been detained.” This was a reference to a deal struck two years earlier, under which Rwanda’s government had agreed to take in asylum seekers who entered the U.K. unlawfully—and who had not come from Rwanda. In concrete terms, the scheme appeared to be an abject failure: an early flight was dramatically grounded following legal challenges, with Britain’s Supreme Court eventually ruling that Rwanda was not a safe place to send asylum seekers; in the end, only four people went—voluntarily, after being paid. Not long after the Home Office posted the video, the governing Conservative Party lost power in a landslide, and the new Labour government immediately scrapped the policy. (The new Home Secretary described it as “the most shocking waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen.”) From the start, however, critics surmised that the plan was as much about looking tough as it was about deporting people. Various observers borrowed a formulation coined by The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer: the cruelty was the point.
Serwer’s essay came out in 2018, and made the case that President Trump and his supporters had found community in celebrating harshness toward people they hate, including migrants. Since Trump has returned to office, on an even more racist platform, cruelty—and the performance thereof—have, again, often seemed to be the point. Early on, the Administration sent the first of what it said would be thousands of migrants to Guantánamo, which Jonathan Blitzer described, in this magazine, as “the ideal stage for Trump’s brand of political theatre.” (So far, much as with the U.K.’s Rwanda plan, a relatively small number of people have actually been sent, and at significant cost.) The official White House account on X has posted footage of shackled migrants being put on a plane and labelled it as “ASMR,” a type of content designed to elicit pleasurable, sensual feelings; the account has also mocked, by name, specific individuals who have been caught in immigration-enforcement actions. At a rally in Michigan, Trump played a horrific video from a mega-prison in El Salvador, which agreed to receive more than two hundred migrants alleged to be gang members, flown in from the U.S. The video showed the detainees being wrestled into the prison and shaved. Afterward, the crowd hollered, and chanted “U.S.A.!”
Much of the attention around the El Salvador deportation deal has understandably focussed on the cruelty of the associated imagery—Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, even travelled to the prison to be filmed in front of half-naked detainees lined up behind bars—and on the inclusion of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the government later acknowledged deporting by mistake. Abrego Garcia is Salvadoran, but most of those deported were from Venezuela; indeed, the transfer appeared to be predicated on what’s known as a “safe third country” agreement, similar to the U.K.’s Rwanda policy. The Trump Administration has already sent migrants from a number of countries to Panama and Costa Rica, and has reportedly sought deportation arrangements with countries farther afield, including Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Benin, Eswatini, Mongolia, Kosovo, Moldova, and Ukraine. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, recently confirmed that the U.S. is asking other countries to take “despicable human beings” as a “favor,” adding, “the further away from America, the better.” One of the countries on the list is in fact Rwanda, which has already taken in one U.S. deportee, an Iraqi citizen, and is now in talks about receiving more. “It’s not the first time that we’d be engaging in such a kind of deal,” the country’s foreign minister said last week.
Trump attempted a version of this kind of third-country arrangement toward the end of his first term, involving El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala; in the years since, his aides and allies appear to have been inspired to try again, and to go further, by the U.K.’s Rwanda policy. (There’s speculation that the U.S. may use housing that was funded by British taxpayers for that very policy.) The U.K.’s experience is one reminder, among others, that, although much about Trump’s approach to immigration is distinctively vile, it is part of a wider global crackdown that has broken new ground in recent years, even under moderate governments. (Just this week, the U.K.’s Labour administration unveiled tighter controls on visas, accompanied by controversial rhetoric about the country becoming “an island of strangers.”)
And while third-country deals, in particular, can facilitate bloodcurdling spectacles such as we’ve seen from El Salvador, they don’t always; the U.K.’s Rwanda deal ended up sending muddled messages, and what we know of the Trump Administration’s approach to the policy so far doesn’t uniformly involve imagery of a distant gulag designed to satisfy the MAGA base. But cruelty can still very much be the point of such arrangements, even when it isn’t performed with visceral immediacy. The ultimate message is one of dehumanization—treating people like pawns who can be moved at will around a global chessboard, to countries that sound less hospitable, and, in many cases, do, in fact, have poor human-rights records. This message may be designed to deter migrants from coming at all. But the ultimate audience is domestic.
The U.K.’s Rwanda policy was announced, in 2022, by the government of Boris Johnson, a key architect of Brexit. A central promise of Brexit was that Britain would regain firmer control over its borders; primarily, the Rwanda policy was pitched as a way to clamp down on traffickers smuggling migrants across the English Channel on small boats. Critics suggested that Johnson timed the announcement to distract from the fact that he’d just been fined for attending a party in defiance of his own COVID restrictions, though the policy had been months in the making. The COVID scandal would soon help bring Johnson down, but his eventual successor, Rishi Sunak, kept pursuing the Rwanda policy, at one point making a bet with Piers Morgan that deportation flights would begin before the next election. “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda,” Suella Braverman, who served as Home Secretary under Sunak, once said. “That’s my dream. It’s my obsession.”
Though the policy was clearly intended to send a harsh message, its execution sometimes belied that goal. When it was announced, a leading government minister posted an image of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, under blue skies, almost evoking “a pleasant city break,” as an academic later put it; a Rwandan official suggested that the policy would help migrants build dignified lives, and Johnson warned against stereotyping the country, describing it as one of the safest in the world (even though his own government had previously expressed concerns about its respect for civil and political rights). Later, Braverman visited homes intended to house migrants and praised the interior design. (The Telegraph ran a story about their off-street parking and fibre-optic broadband.) At one point, the British comedian Stewart Lee referred to “Schrödinger’s Rwanda,” which he defined as “a place at once so awful that the very thought of being deported there will deter asylum seekers from crossing the Channel and yet simultaneously so brilliant that asylum seekers should be delighted to be sent there.” After it emerged that the first person to actually board a flight had gone voluntarily, and been paid to do so, after failing to claim asylum in the U.K., a different commentator noted that this hardly seemed like a deterrent, either.
The recent El Salvador deportations gave rise to some dissonance, too: when the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen went to the country to check on Abrego Garcia, Salvadoran officials posed them near a hotel pool with drinks that looked like margaritas. This was perhaps best read as trolling, which can itself be a form of cruelty. Reporting in the Wall Street Journal has suggested that U.S. officials actually don’t much care about what happens to migrants once they leave the country. (They might not all end up in mega-prisons: per CNN, a deal with Rwanda could involve deportees getting stipends and job-seeking assistance.) This might be because the third-country deals are intended, above all, to juice top-line deportation numbers. According to the Washington Post, Administration officials see such deals as a work-around to expel people who are already subject to final deportation orders but whose home countries won’t have them back. Many of the deals are not being negotiated as a tool of public performance but in secrecy.
Officials are reportedly discussing a goal of deporting a million people this year. The performed cruelty of, say, the El Salvador video, which seems aimed at deterring migrants from coming to the U.S., may, somewhat counterintuitively, get in the way of that goal. (Trump has boasted of unlawful border crossings falling on his watch—and yet, as the Post noted, that reduction stems the flow of people available to deport.) It’s also unclear that the third-country approach will accelerate deportations in practice. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that the Administration can’t send people to countries where they aren’t citizens without giving them a meaningful opportunity to apply for humanitarian protections in the U.S. Last week, after reports emerged that the Administration was about to fly migrants to Libya, the judge said that such a move would violate his order.
Yet the Administration has not been keen to comply with court orders related to deportations, and may be on the cusp of even more extreme steps: later in the week, Stephen Miller, the driving force behind Trump’s immigration policies, said that the Administration is considering suspending habeas corpus for migrants, arguing that the Constitution permits the government to do so during an “invasion.” It’s far from clear that the law allows what Miller is proposing. But, either way, there’s political advantage simply in having the fight. (Separately, Miller called the Libya ruling a “judicial coup.”) Republicans have painted their deportation push as a commonsense measure being obstructed by out-of-touch liberal élites siding with bloodthirsty criminals. This sort of rhetoric underscores a broader truth: that the goal of mass deportation is part of a cruel and performative politics however you achieve it—and whether you achieve it or not. The particulars of how deportees are treated in the country where they end up matters immensely, of course. But it’s all in service of the same end: being able to say, “We sent people who shouldn’t be here as far away as possible,” or, at least, “We tried and the libs stopped us.”
The U.K.’s Rwanda policy was testament to similar dynamics. As Sam Knight put it for this magazine, in 2022, when legal challenges grounded the first flight, Johnson stood to benefit anyway, since the ruling played into a favored tactic of his, honed during Britain’s Brexit wars: “to conflate foreign judges, activist lawyers, people-smuggling gangs, and so-called economic migrants,” and mass them “into one great, invisible net that is somehow holding Great Britain back.” However officials may have explicitly characterized Rwanda, they implied a cruel message just by choosing the country in the first place; it read, as the philosopher Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́ Ṣóyẹmí wrote last year, as “a place, in that ‘other continent,’ where the government can send people it does not distinguish from waste,” where “no one who is really ‘from here’ will ever go.” Trump, infamously, had his own word for such countries, from those on the African continent to El Salvador. It was a lot more explicit, and profane. ♦
