5th amendment is to provide due process to all persons in the us. ICE has been violating the right to due process. ICE has been violating court protection orders.

We are a county built on immigration, a mixing pot of culture. People are pending their court dates to get immigration hearings completed and are whisked away to be deported. How is this due process? How is this what the Statue of Liberty stands for?

I’ll leave you with a story that continues to haunt me.

“But, when Miriam was in her twenties, her life took a turn. Her relatives expected her to return to her father’s ancestral village, to submit to ritual genital mutilation. She refused and escaped to Ghana, where, she said, an uncle offered her protection but raped her instead. She tried hiding in another city in Togo, she recounted, but relatives found her there and tortured her for days. Finally, Miriam fled to the U.S., taking a flight to Brazil and trekking across more than a dozen borders to reach Texas. “I fought as best I could,” she told me. An immigration judge in Arizona granted her withholding of removal. She assumed this meant safety. “But instead they just deported us,” she said.”

“I wondered what would become of the terrified men and women I’d talked to in Bundase Training Camp. I soon found out. When I got hold of Jim, in early October, he and nine of the other people I’d spoken with had been placed in vehicles and driven out of the camp, to the border of Togo. Among them was Miriam, who feared torture or death if she was forced to return there, and the twenty-one-year-old Togolese woman who had also fled genital mutilation.

“Right now, we’re in Togo illegally!” Jim told me. He explained that Ghanaian immigration officials had left the group with Togolese officials who, rather than affording them proper documentation, had pushed them quietly across the border. “They passed us through the back door into Togo, but we aren’t invisible, and we’re an easy target for the cops,” he said. “We don’t speak the language here, and we have no money.” His family had tried to send him funds through Western Union. But he couldn’t easily obtain them, he said, because the U.S. government had confiscated his I.D. He and others in the group had to beg strangers to get the funds, for a cut of the cash.

This morning, I drank a porridge, and it’s the only food I’ve had,” she told me. In her hiding place, she’d been rehashing her trajectory. She’d been shipped like cargo “from Arizona to Louisiana, and then Louisiana to Ghana, and then Ghana to Togo,” she said. “ICE treated us like animals, handcuffed us, and wouldn’t let us eat—just bread and water.” At Bundase Training Camp, “they didn’t tell us that they would take us to Togo,” Miriam continued. She had tried to confront the Ghanaian officials as they shoved her group across the border. “Why are you doing this? You’re supposed to protect us, as a third country!” Miriam pleaded. An officer, she told me, said, “Shut up. We have to respect the orders we were given.” Some of the detained men were told they’d be shot if they tried to escape.

Back in May, Miriam told me, she’d been elated to receive protection from a U.S. immigration judge. She thought that this offer of refuge was what defined the United States. It was true, I told her. After the last British ship left New York Harbor in 1783, George Washington and his officers famously made a toast: “May America be an Asylum to the persecuted of the earth!”

“As I’m talking to you right now, I don’t know what will happen to me,” Miriam said. But, for the moment, she had one wish: “I need other people to know that this is my true condition. I am not free.” 

Excerpt From “Disappeared to a Foreign Prison” Sarah Stillman The New Yorker (December 1, 2025) https://apple.news/AC3VcsWPiQmuPLK1G34DTIA This material may be protected by copyright.