Dan Gillmor
@dangillmor@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

This is the kind of headline that makes me so disgusted with journalism right now: "After six months in ICE custody, Charlotte woman chooses voluntary removal to Honduras" --

ICE kidnapped and imprisoned her. ICE subjects its prisoners to all kinds of indignities and abuses. She "agreed" to leave due to vile conditions inside, as story notes.

There is NOTHING voluntary about this. It's like a "confession" after torture.

At the very least, the headline should have put "voluntary" in quotes.
Gerrit Venema 🇪🇺🌍🍉
@gvenema@fairmove.net replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago
@dangillmor

"Voluntary deportation/removal" as such, is entirely a propaganda construct.

Six months of sadistic detention forcing people to abandon their civil rights, is what it is. In a normal world, the state would be liable for a severe breach of universal human rights, and would be put on an international watchlist of human rights breakers and shunned from UN organizations and be boycotted for policies of Apartheid (a Dutch word) by all countries against Apartheid.
NoBorg
@hadon@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago
@dangillmor
She told her mom she was scared of not getting out of that place alive.

"The organization El Refugio, which provides temporary shelter for families visiting those detained at Stewart, sent a letter to ICE requesting her release for medical reasons. They report that the young woman has suffered from scoliosis, numbness on the left side of her body, bleeding, fainting, and abdominal pain since her arrest."
https://quepasamedia.com/noticias/charlotte/joven-arrestada-por-ice-en-charlotte-mama-siento-que-no-voy-a-salir-viva/
NoBorg
@hadon@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago
@dangillmor I imagine they refer to Allison Bustillo. I read here that 2 months ago she had already lost 17 pounds (and she wasn't overweight to start with, as you can see in the pictures. She had been living in the US since she was 8, she was attending college in North Caroline to be a nurse assistant. Never committed any crime.
https://quepasamedia.com/noticias/charlotte/joven-arrestada-por-ice-en-charlotte-mama-siento-que-no-voy-a-salir-viva/
𝐉𝐨𝐧 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐫
@jonberger@sfba.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago
@dangillmor They should have put the whole phrase "voluntary removal" in quotes. It's a piece of Legalese jargon: she left the country without an immigration judge (or "judge" actually, since they're not really judges) having issued an order authorizing the government to remove her. That, in immigration-law parlance, is called "voluntary removal." I expect that's what the reporter meant, and since he or she probably does a lot of immigration stories the phrase is a familiar one to the reporter, but since it's not familiar to people who aren't in the immigration trenches, it should have been called out as a term of art.
Daniel M. Reck
@DanielMReck@mas.to replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago
@dangillmor As WUNC is a public media outlet, there is a fair chance they have an ombuds that takes reader feedback and examines the journalistic integrity of the story and title.

Even if they don't have an ombuds, you very well could get them to do better with a kind note to the newsroom director or editor proposing their headline should better represent the dire reality of the woman's plight.