It is Wednesday 6 December 2023 in Barcelona's airport, shortly before 2.30pm.
I am preparing to board Vueling flight VY7574 from Barcelona to Banjul in Gambia, when I experience – for the first time upfront and personal – the ugly face of Europe’s inhumane immigration policy.
I am boarding in Group 1, so I am the first passenger down the jetway. As I approach the aircraft door, I can hear a woman crying.
When I get closer, I see a police man restraining a woman at the entrance to the plane.
The woman is very upset. She is very young, almost a child. She is short, very thin. Her lips are cracked and she has a harrowed look on her face. She is wearing blue cargo pants that are too large for her small body, a baggy grey sweatshirt with a hood, and white sneakers.
A police woman is talking to one of the flight attendants. She is holding a brown envelope in her hand. It appears to contain the young woman’s papers.
The young woman is pleading. Whenever the policeman tries to coax her on board the plane, she grabs hold of something and begs not to be taken on board.
She is being deported.
There is panic is her voice. She sounds like she is breaking. She is far too small to resist, but she still struggles, meekly like an animal that knows it is being taken to the abattoir.
All the passengers are standing right next to this spectacle, some watching, some looking away, all in silence. Doing nothing,
It is extremely distressing.
It is not just me feeling it. I can feel the other passengers feeling it too. Some start to talk, some point.
Then a child starts to cry.
I reach for my phone and take a few photos.
(Source: own photo).
A flight attendant asks the police man something and the police man nods and then ushers the girl out through the side entrance of the jetway next to the aircraft door. They have decided to let the passengers board first before bringing the girl onboard.
We board the plane and take our seats.
When we are all seated they bring her on board.
She is tiny and fragile. Her head barely reaches above the height of the seat backs. She is no longer crying, but I can see that her eyes are bloodshot as the police woman escorts her down the aisle to her seat at the back, past all the passengers.
A flight attendant follows behind with her tiny light-blue suitcase, a child’s toy suitcase.
Then the police woman leaves and they close the aircraft doors.
The seatbelt sign comes on and the flight attendants begin to go through the safety briefing.
Suddenly the young girl gets up and walks up the aisle to the front of the aircraft. She gestures at the door.
The flight attendant tells her to go back to her seat. She refuses. She keeps shaking her head from side to side. She is talking, pleading, all the time. I cannot make out what she is saying.
She grabs hold of the seat backs when they try to usher her back to her seat.
One of the flight attendants asks her instead to take a vacant seat near the front of the plane.
She sits down, but immediately gets up again.
The flight attendant calls for help. Two other flight attendants come. They are all men. They surround her.
She gets distressed again and starts to cry. At one point she sits down on the floor. They lift her to her feet.
One of the flight attendants then goes to inform the pilot.
At this point I get out my phone and take a few more photos.
The tallest flight attendant sees me. He immediately rushes to my seat and tells me to turn off my camera.
(Source: my own photos)
I turn off the camera. He instructs me delete my pictures. I ask him why. He says it is illegal to take pictures on board. I ask why. He points to a small section of the Safety on Board Card, which says no filming.
(Source: my own photo)
I have never seen this before on any airline. Is this a new thing? Now I know why they have this rule. On rendition flights.
The flight attendant forgets to ask me to empty the bin on the phone. I am able to recover the photos.
More and more passengers are getting upset at the sight of the girl. Now that she is at the front of the plane everyone can see what is going on.
A man next to me raises his voice and demands that we take off. A woman behind me says, “This is very distressing! She is only a little girl!”.
The woman in the row ahead of me has overheard my conversation with the flight attendant about the photos. She turns around and says, “Well done for standing up for her”.
I thank her. But I have done nothing. I feel completely helpless. I can do nothing for this girl.
I just wish that she continues to refuse to sit down, because then, maybe, they will take her off the plane.
More and more people speak up. Someone begins to shout in a language I do not understand. It is getting a bit out of hand.
Suddenly a stocky woman in a green shirt, black trousers, and white sneakers seated in an aisle seat a few rows in front of me gets up.
She walks up to the African girl and the flight attendants and tells them something.
I surmise she must be an onboard plain-clothed police officer.
I cannot hear what she says, but one of the flight attendants calls the cockpit, while the other opens the aircraft door.
Less than a minute later, two uniformed police officers appear at the door and the African woman is escorted off the plane.
I feel relief, but also deep sadness. I cannot stop thinking about how alone and vulnerable this girl must feel. How distressed she is.
I have no idea why she is being deported. Maybe she is a criminal. Maybe she is super-manipulative and has done this many times before.
Or maybe she is just a lost immigrant child.
She did not speak a word of Spanish. Maybe she has gone through hell to come to Europe. She seemed utterly terrified at leaving, perhaps afraid of what awaits her back home? Maybe she owes bad people a lot of money for her trip to Europe, maybe she will be sold, even killed, when she gets back? Or maybe her family will be terrorised? Or maybe she just cannot face a life of hopeless poverty...
This is the cutting edge of European immigration policy. Africans and people from other poverty-stricken and war-torn parts of the world head to Europe to improve their lives. It is their only chance to make something of this their only life.
They often take huge risks to come here. They often incur massive debts. They are exploited and treated like animals.
And then we throw them out without any regard to what happens to them when they get back.
Why is Vueling participating in rendition flights? Why is Vueling putting deeply distressed half-children on their commercial flights?
How can ordinary flight attendants and police officers do this kind of work? How can they live with themselves? And what about the civil servants, who work with ministers behind the scenes to operationalise these policies? Where do they find these people?
There is only one silver lining for me. I learned something. I got to witness what Europe’s immigration policy is really like.
It is cruel, cowardly, inhumane.
I will never forget the young woman.
Her ordeal is far from over. She can expect the next attempt to deport her to be far worse. Based on what happens in Denmark, she will be accompanied by two police officers on the entire trip. As a deeply distressed deportee, her hands and feet are likely to be tied to the seat and she will be fitted with a diaper so she does not have to get up to go to the toilet during the flight. She will be injected with a strong sedative if she shouts or in any other way becomes difficult. This is how we treat other human beings.
The End