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ICE Deports Colombian Torture Victim—to Africa
Last year, we broke the story of a woman ICE had repeatedly tried to send to Mexico or a third country. Things have gotten even worse.
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ICE FINALLY STUCK IT to one of their detainees. Except this person is no criminal, no murderer, no monster. She is a torture victim from Colombia, one who—as we wrote last year—was repeatedly beaten and raped by the police buddies of her ex-boyfriend.
Adriana Quiroz Zapata finally escaped Colombia with her life, only to find more mistreatment at the hands of U.S. federal agents.
Because the Convention Against Torture prevented her from being deported to Colombia, ICE instead packed her onto a bus and tried to abandon her in Mexico, a country where she has no ties. But Mexican immigration authorities declined to take her after hearing details of her harrowing journey.
I wrote that story last April. On April 16 of this year, Zapata was finally removed from the United States. Along with fourteen others, she was shipped off to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—once again, a country where she has no ties.
Rep. Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) who counts Zapata’s family members as constituents, told me the Trump administration clearly wanted to dump her in Africa with no actual plan or respect for her ability to survive.
“There’s no limits to their cruelty and I think that’s what’s really important for the American people to know, there’s a complete misalignment with what they sold the American people,” he said. “Americans are being shot in the street, people with protected status are being removed to third countries in Africa. Think about the hypocrisy on so many levels: They said they had to cut $1 trillion in fraud, waste, and abuse yet they’re using taxpayer money to remove people with protected status and flying them to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
On the House floor, Menendez slammed Republicans for being “silent” and “complicit” with respect to Trump’s mass deportation campaign brutalizing our neighbors—and said of Zapata, “If we do not get her back she will die.”
Menendez’s office and Zapata’s lawyer, Lauren O’Neal, both told me that the medical issues we wrote about last year have only worsened. Zapata’s prediabetes became diabetes due to her diet in detention, and she has been prescribed medication that officials in the DRC told O’Neal cannot be provided. Zapata did not respond to my request for comment about how she is doing mentally and physically; O’Neal told me her client is “fragile” and “very sensitive” right now.
In an April 23 letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requesting Zapata’s expedited humanitarian parole back to the United States, O’Neal said that Zapata is being provided only bread and water, with escorted access to a convenience store. And O’Neal alleges that even the DRC may just be a way station: She says that DRC representatives, in conjunction with diplomatic officials from Colombia, have engaged in pressuring tactics. Their goal is apparently for Zapata, and other detainees like her, to sign documents agreeing to relinquish their rights—which, in Zapata’s case, would send her back to Colombia where she could be in grave danger once again.
“It seems the lawlessness is commonplace, it’s almost like I’m living in some twilight zone,” O’Neal told me. I pointed out to her that there seems to be some personal animosity in the actions of U.S. immigration authorities against Zapata, not just for filing a complaint in the past, which got an agent reassigned, but perhaps for how much she and her allies have fought for her release.
O’Neal agreed with the suggestion that Zapata was being targeted in that way, as did Menendez. O’Neal received a call from an ICE agent in the days preceding Zapata’s removal to the DRC where she learned Zapata was being given medical treatment. O’Neal asked if it was for an old broken arm injury or for her diabetes but was told Zapata was given a yellow fever vaccine—a prerequisite before being sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. O’Neal told me she could hear the “glee” in the ICE agent’s voice as they delivered the news.
Menendez said Americans should be horrified by the inhumanity of this situation, and by the affront to the rule of law that Zapata’s case represents. And he took a parting shot at Republicans who have stood by as Trump’s deportation forces have rampaged through communities only now wanting to moderate on the issue ahead of midterm elections.
“This is the same party that wraps themselves in religion, but they don’t say a word when a person is tortured in their country of origin, tortured here, then removed to the DRC,” he said.
O’Neal told me her Jewish background informs the slippery slope she sees for an administration that has come for immigrants now, here legally or not, and that could come for others later on.
“I want Americans to know what they should have known the whole time: that this administration’s utter and complete lack of due process of law should strike so much fear in us,” she said. “Today it serves their interest to do it to immigrants, but it shows how little you have to protect yourself . . . unchecked federal power is what our forefathers didn’t want.”
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