The plight of Eritrean refugees, while relatively small, strikes at the heart of the ongoing dispute in America over who is entitled to seek refuge within its borders, and what to do with people who are already here.
As the U.S. remains locked in a debate over asylum seekers from Central America, lawyers and advocacy groups say they are seeing an alarming uptick in deportations to the African nation of Eritrea -- a country that President Donald Trump's government acknowledges arbitrarily imprisons and tortures its own citizens.
“He explained to the U.S. government, if he gets deported, the Eritrean government will imprison him and torture him, all that kind of stuff,” his close friend in the Washington area, Tesfom Debesai, told ABC News. “If he went back to this country, something was going to happen to him.” Eritrea's authoritarian government tortures, forcibly disappears, and indefinitely detains its citizens, who lack an array of civil rights and freedoms, according to the State Department's 2018 report on human rights in the country. Human rights groups say it also uses extortion and threats of violence to compel its nationals residing abroad to pay a 2% income tax before they can obtain basic services.
To force Eritrea’s hand, in September 2017, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would stop issuing a wide range of U.S. visas to Eritreans. Since then, the number of Eritreans deported has spiked by over 50%, an increase ICE has attributed to the heightened pressure. As the United States pushes to accelerate deportations, several immigration attorneys who work with Eritreans told ABC News that individuals who go before U.S. immigration judges without a legal assistance might struggle to counter claims that the human rights situation in their home country has improved. There is no guarantee to a lawyer in U.S. immigration courts.
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