Immigration | Injustice
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This story was originally published by The Boston Globe, December 31, 2021. Republished here with permission of the Editors.
A few dozen men and women shuffled up the stairs to the Boeing 767 lashed in five-point restraints: ankles bound in cuffs joined by thick chains, wrists manacled, and the whole rig secured to metal belts draped heavily about each waist. Frightened, depressed, and faint from lack of food and water, one of the men, a Cameroonian singer, tripped and fell. A cadre of armed guards immediately swarmed him.
“They pulled me across the tarmac, sat on my back, and stuffed me into a sack,” says the man, whose name I am withholding to protect him from retribution.
According to the singer and two men who said they were eyewitnesses, the guards immobilized his already hobbled legs, wrapping them in a stiff black blanket and compressing them at the ankles, knees, and thighs with a series of yellow seat-belt-type straps. They enveloped his chained upper body in an armless vest clipped tightly at the back. Then they folded him “like a…
