Trump Administration Seeks Secret African Hosts for Deportees
HOSPITALITY, n. The condition of being received by a government that has been paid, in coin not yet disclosed, to receive you. Its rules require that the guest be unknown to the host, the host unknown to the public, and the payment unknown to everyone but the two who exchanged it.
The Trump administration has struck arrangements with several African countries to take in undocumented migrants deported from the United States. The word for this is agreement. The operational word is unpublished. We know of these arrangements because Forbidden Stories, FRANCE 24 and RFI spent seven months assembling what the governments could have supplied in a paragraph. That interval is the measure of the thing. A policy that takes journalists more than half a year to establish was not concealed by accident.
The strongest defence deserves a hearing. Diplomacy is conducted quietly, and no state announces a negotiating position before it has a signature. A country that agrees to receive deportees may face a hostile press at home, and discretion spares it that. All of this is true of the negotiation. It ceases to be true when the negotiation ends. Once the terms are settled, secrecy no longer protects a bargaining position. It protects the bargain from examination, and examination is the only thing the bargain has cause to fear.
Consider how little coordination this requires. Washington need not conspire with anyone. It needs only to observe that a deportee sent to a third country cannot easily be counted, sued for, or asked after by a member of Congress with a district and a grudge. Each African government, for its part, needs only to observe that a favour done quietly to a powerful patron is worth more than the same favour announced to voters. The incentives align without a single meeting of minds, and the silence is what each party brings to the table. Neither has to trust the other. Each has only to keep quiet, which is the one form of trust that costs nothing and can be denied afterward.
The columns, then.
Stated purpose: an orderly removal of persons with no lawful claim to remain. Observed outcome: persons with no lawful claim to remain in the United States are relocated to countries where, by the terms of the arrangement, they also have no claim on anyone.
Stated purpose: partnership between sovereign states. Observed outcome: a partnership in which one sovereign’s obligations are described in no public document and the other’s payment is a matter of conjecture.
Stated purpose: the rule of law. Observed outcome: a procedure whose terms cannot be cited, and therefore cannot be breached.
What the investigation says is disputed, and the nature and details of these deals are the very things at issue. I note only that this dispute is the one the secrecy was built to produce. A public treaty can be argued over clause by clause, and an unpublished understanding can only be denied or confirmed, both at the discretion of the party with the most to lose. That leaves the deportee’s position. A man is put on an aircraft in one country and taken off it in another whose language he may not speak, carrying whatever fits in a plastic bag. Asked by what authority he has been sent there, he will find that the authority exists and that nobody can show it to him.
The disappeared party in this account is not the host government, which has its reasons, or the American one, which has its own. It is the migrant, who was the subject of every sentence in the official version and is the signatory of none. Every party to the arrangement has a copy of it, or a memory of it, or a payment to show for it. The one person it governs has been given the flight number.
Read through the operational definition, the story is about who may be known. A government that sends a person abroad and keeps the terms private has bought a place for the person and a silence for itself, and the silence was the more expensive purchase. At the arrivals gate the receiving official checks a list. The man’s name is on it. The reason is not.