Rusty 🇺🇦🇨🇦

The horror is in the bargain. The Wall Street Journal investigation describes an administration willing to turn human beings into bargaining chips—and provide military equipment to a security force previously accused of torture and war crimes as part of the same arrangement. The Trump administration is offering Cameroon roughly $35 million in armored military equipment while securing an agreement to accept people deported from the United States. Cameroon’s Rapid Intervention Battalion was previously cut off from U.S. assistance over allegations of torture and other grave abuses. Imagine being forced onto a plane, ripped away from the life you have built, and delivered to a country where you may be detained, abused, or sent on to the very danger you fled. Imagine not knowing where you will sleep, whether you will be safe, or whether anyone will ever find you. Now imagine that your fate has been negotiated behind closed doors. Your freedom, your safety, your very future—reduced to a line in a diplomatic bargain. Your life exchanged for armored vehicles. These are human beings, many Black and brown. They are not cargo. They are not diplomatic currency. They are not disposable. The obscenity is that the United States is not simply abandoning vulnerable people. It is helping equip a security force accused of grave abuses while using those same vulnerable people as leverage to secure the deal. This is cruelty elevated to foreign policy.