The voices of the returned

In March of this year, the Trump administration claimed America was being invaded by a foreign gang and deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants from U.S. soil to El Salvador. It did so under the Alien Enemies Act, sparking a legal battle and public outcry. Last Friday, more than 250 of those men were traded to Venezuela by El Salvador in exchange for the release of ten U.S. citizens and permanent residents held prisoner there, in a swap that appears to violate international law.

But the good news is that though these men were meant to never be heard from again, we are hearing from them. And they’re bearing witness to what happened after their rendition to El Salvador from the United States.

Today, I want to talk about the voices of the lost and of the returned, as well as the importance of remembering those who are currently between, in some state of limbo, so that we can prevent them from vanishing. But today’s post will be a strange ride today, so bear with me.

I finished college in 1989, the year British director Peter Greenaway’s movie The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover came out. It was an odd, atmospheric film, and I was intrigued by its visual tapestry.

In the months that followed, I watched all the Peter Greenaway movies I could find. Videos were inexpensive to rent, though you had to go to a physical store on foot to get them then. I lived in group houses, and we took turns getting movies. It was cheap entertainment, and DC had places where all kinds of small-budget and foreign films were available.

I was painting a lot at the time, and Greenaway’s films had the feeling of a series of lush, static artworks. I won’t pretend that what I was getting out of the stories was what Greenaway was intending to put into them. But in my mind, many of them were about death and creation and cataloguing the world—trying to use art and lists in sequence to somehow bring things to order.

One of the productions we watched at some point was Death in the Seine, which took a real historical log as its base material. A ledger of the more than 300 dead bodies pulled out of the waters of the Seine in Paris between 1795 and 1801 exists, and Greenaway highlights some two dozen of the entries by recreating their appearance in the morgue behind the cathedral of Notre Dame, as well as their processing by workers there.

People aren’t supposed to die in a river. The ledger is a catalogue of bad luck, of malice, of failures of society to protect its vulnerable, and of humans to respect the humanity of others. But the film is not historical reenactment. And, if memory serves (though I haven’t seen it in over thirty years), it was gross and mundane yet somehow sweet, with comic moments—and was surprisingly moving, despite a large quantity of vomit.

The Unknown Girl

Decades after its arrival, Death in the Seine has slipped into middle obscurity. A different creation also tied to the Seine that’s made a more lasting impression on popular culture is “L’Inconnue de la Seine,” a death mask of a young girl whose body was pulled from the river in the nineteenth century. In one version of the story about it, her visage was said to have so moved a sculptor there that he made a cast of her face.

The mask became legendary as that of a lovely girl whose beauty transcended a terrible early death, which was assumed to be due to suicide. The mask was mass-produced, and decades later, countless people had it in their homes.

It became a phenomenon that never died. That mask wound up being the face of the Resuscitation Annie mannequin many of us learned to do CPR on, if you ever took a class on cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.

But, really, everything around the mask’s origins is suspect. None of the stories around it are likely true. We don’t even know that the young woman had died in the Seine. Unlike the ledger of the drowned from the Seine that Peter Greenaway embroidered for his film, the enormous cultural mythology around the mask is much vaster than any facts about the girl, which essentially don’t exist.

Paris 1961

More concrete deaths of real humans were often both less romantic and less likely to be remembered. Authorities in Paris—as well as France itself—were uninterested in cataloguing or learning the details on the dead from October 17, 1961, when 30,000 individuals had gathered in the city to peacefully protest a curfew.

The Algerian battle for independence from France was then in its seventh year. The people who assembled in Paris that night were overwhelmingly Algerian and were defying a curfew that targeted them specifically.

Law enforcement opened fire on part of the crowd that night, killing at least one hundred protesters, possibly two or three times that many altogether. Some 14,000 Algerians were arrested; thousands were detained and deported. A BBC report from the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre records that French authorities censored coverage of the violence, destroying records and keeping journalists from being able to investigate what happened.

A half century after the murders, the newspaper L’Humanite tried to preserve the past and reconstruct what happened. “I don’t know by what miracle I was not thrown in the river,” said eyewitness Hocine Hakem told the newspaper. He had been eighteen at the time of the killings.

Left-wing newspapers expressed outrage in 1961 and even filed a lawsuit, but they were focused on killings of other protesters—those they saw as truly French. But the leftist press remained silent about the much higher death toll of Algerians.

Bodies that washed up on the banks of the river in the days that followed the massacre revealed gunshot wounds and skulls that had been bashed in. Graffiti painted on a wall along the riverbank read “Ici on noie les Algériens” or “Here we drown Algerians.” Whether it was meant to be a threat or eyewitness testimony, the graffiti provided its own historical documentation of events that had taken place.

If there were to be a true record of all the dead bodies in the Seine, to match and extend the historical ledger from the turn of the nineteenth century that Greenaway used in his film, it isn’t clear whether the girl whose face is the celebrated death mask even belongs on it. But without all the names of the Algerian dead from 1961, the fact is that any list remains woefully incomplete.

Tracking moral outrages

I’m telling you about all this because people are being targeted right now. People are disappearing before our eyes. After the suppression that happened in 1961, French researcher Jean-Luc Einaudi spent years searching for eyewitnesses to the violence and trying to reconstruct events from that evening. It took him decades to piece together what had happened.

But now, we have so many more ways to monitor and record what the authorities do, to track these moral outrages that unfold daily. We are still able to work to prevent the kind of suppression that happened back in 1961 from being repeated, and to prevent the deaths in the first place.

Every person who is run through this harrowing process is a witness to its cruelty. The more attention we can call to what’s happening in real time, and to amplify the voices of those who can testify as to what’s happening, the lower the body count is likely to be in the end.

This spring, there were calls not to talk about immigration, because it was an issue Trump ran on and won with. Yet in hindsight, the coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in the first weeks after his illegal deportation to El Salvador appears to have helped shift public opinion against Trump’s immigration policies—but only during the time that it received media attention. We can keep the focus on his case and others who have received similar treatment, making sure our local authorities are aware of it, and pressing media to cover what is happening in our communities.

Before the world’s eyes

In some cases, as with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem at CECOT prison in El Salvador and the Everglades concentration camp, we see the administration documenting its own cruelty. And it’s good to point those moments out. But we have to take those images and overlay them with the voices of what is being done to people in the facilities about which the administration boasts. Where we don’t yet have that information, we have to keep the names and the families of the disappeared before the world’s eyes.

This can be done in small ways. Earlier this year, Michael Jay McClure began posting a picture every day of Andry José Hernandez Romero, the hairdresser deported to CECOT, to remind others that no one had heard from him and that he shouldn’t be forgotten.

After months without news, Hernandez Romero was one of those released in El Salvador’s sketchy prisoner exchange involving Venezuela and the U.S. last week. (As an aside, I’ll note that the exchange only further underlines that despite the administration’s statements in court and to the media, the U.S. appears to have remained in control of the CECOT prisoners the whole time they were in El Salvador.)

The accounts given by those men who were released from CECOT to Venezuela are brutal. “We were kidnapped,” Arturo Suárez told a Venezuelan broadcaster. “We got a beating for breakfast. We got a beating for lunch. We got a beating for dinner.” Since his court-ordered return to the U.S. in June, Abrego Garcia described similar beatings, as well as being forced to remain upright kneeling through the night and guards threatening him with being turned over to gang members in the prison.

ICE detention narratives

In Vanity Fair, we finally also heard from Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University doctoral student and Turkish national who was ambushed by ICE on the streets—apparently over an editorial she submitted. She was detained then released in May. Öztürk wrote about the grinding negligence in ICE facilities, and the mistreatment of countless women she encountered, whose voices she is now trying to amplify and share.

She described an Armenian woman she met who asked every time they met, “Rümeysa, please write about us. Please let the world hear our story.” She wrote, “I am keeping my promise, Auntie.” 

It might be tempting to see people being released from CECOT or ICE detention or brought back to the United States and think that this story now has a happy ending. But the prisoners traded from El Salvador to Venezuela, after being fortune enough to escape the clutches of CECOT, are now back in the country that they fled before coming to the U.S.—a place where many of them fear persecution.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia returning to the US and giving testimony about what was done to him at the behest of the Trump administration is a victory, to be sure, and a big one for anyone opposed to current U.S. immigration policy. But Abrego Garcia is currently facing a choice between electing to stay in detention or having the judge enforce his release only to face immediate likely deportation to a third country by a government that seems set on revenge. There can be no happy ending until the larger nightmare is stopped.

The disappeared, the returned, and the dead

In early August, I’ll be doing an episode focused entirely on the nuts and bolts of how to disrupt ICE’s presence in and partnerships in any community. For now, as I’ve mentioned before, you can talk to your local representatives or their staff to find out what relationship local law enforcement has with ICE and where ICE detention happens near you, and to make it clear you want an end to both.

As we move forward and document what’s happening, a ledger of the drowned and the saved is critical. Each new bit of information we gather about events as they unfold can be a step toward ending the current nightmare.

The testimony of eyewitnesses is a key way we can know what the government is doing in our names—a map of what we need to stand up against. It’s also the most likely means by which public opinion can be turned even further in opposition to this outrageous violence against civilians, against our friends and neighbors.

Historically in concentration camp regimes in ostensible democracies, public opinion shifts slowly, then goes over a cliff under the power of one or two single stories that make an impression about injustice. We can’t know in advance which account of the disappeared, the returned, or the dead will light the fire of righteous fury against what’s happening. We can’t know today, but we can prevent as many disappearances as possible, we can call out the names of the missing, and we can work for their return.

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