Trump Administration Seeks Secret African Hosts for Deportees

This is what democratic societies do to themselves when they come to prefer results to responsibility, and permit their governments to arrange the one without the citizen ever having to witness the other. A people that has grown gentle in its habits does not ask for cruelty. It asks for outcomes, and it grows incurious about the means, which is a different matter and a more durable one.

Consider the type of citizen such a preference produces. He is not hard-hearted. He would be distressed to see a family removed from a kitchen in his own street, and he sends his children to school with people whose papers he has never inspected. But he has also been told, and believes, that the country’s borders are a matter for the government, and he has learned to want the borders kept without wanting to know the mechanics. Between that wish and that ignorance there is an obliging space, and a clever administration will always find a way to occupy it.

The reported arrangements between the Trump administration and several African countries occupy it exactly. According to an investigation of some seven months by Forbidden Stories, FRANCE 24 and RFI, undocumented migrants deported from the United States are being sent to African states that have quietly agreed to receive them. Much about the terms is disputed, and I will not pretend to more certainty than the reporters themselves claim. But the shape is instructive whatever the details prove to be. Deportation, which in a visible form must be defended before a court, a legislature and a neighbour, becomes in this form a transaction between executives, conducted in a register that no ballot ever touched.

The strongest defence deserves a hearing. Diplomacy has always required discretion; no foreign minister negotiates by press release, and a government that promised its electors firmer enforcement is entitled to pursue it by every lawful channel. All of this is true. Yet confidentiality during a negotiation is one thing, and the permanent concealment of its terms from the assembly that funds it and the public that is supposed to authorise it is another. The first protects a bargain. The second protects a government from its own citizens, and does so in the citizens’ name.

Here lies the observation I would press on the reader. The classical tyrant needed the public’s fear; the democratic administrator needs only its inattention. A secret arrangement with third countries performs a subtle service for the majority: it lets them hold a policy without holding a conscience about it. The migrant is not expelled from the country so much as relocated from the national imagination, to a place where no American will meet him, no American court will hear him, and no American newspaper will be tempted to photograph his arrival. One might call it an act of hospitality, though the hosts are being asked to welcome guests who are not their own countrymen and were not, so far as anyone has said, consulted about the invitation.

There is comedy in this, of a bleak administrative sort. A superpower that cannot bring itself to say aloud what it is doing has contracted with several poorer governments to say nothing on its behalf, and the whole edifice of discretion depends upon the discretion of the least powerful parties to it. Secrets shared among many are the most perishable goods in politics. The arrangement guaranteed its own exposure the moment it involved more than one capital, and it was a matter of time before someone with a notebook and a free afternoon began to ask what the hosts were being given in return.

That someone, notably, was not a legislative committee. It was a consortium of French and international journalists, foreigners reading American policy in African capitals, working for months without any office to compel them. I regard this as the substantive point of the story. In a democracy the ordinary organs of scrutiny grow tired or partisan, and what remains is associational: private persons who band together, without commission, to perform the office the public has stopped demanding of itself. Such bodies are fragile. They depend on subscribers, on courage, and on a public still curious enough to read to the end.

Should that curiosity fail, the tendency has an obvious destination. Every awkward obligation will be moved somewhere farther off, to a partner more dependent and a jurisdiction more remote, until the state can do anything at all provided it does so at sufficient distance. And the citizen, comfortably informed of nothing, will have a clear conscience and an empty hand.

One imagines a man stepping off an aircraft into heat he did not choose, holding a folder of American papers that no official there has any instruction to read. He will be the only person in the entire arrangement who has been told nothing false.