The NYT tells us that a New York teenager is trying to avoid deportation to Guinea, a nation she’s not lived in since the was two years old. Part of the reason eighteen-year-old Adama Bah doesn’t want to go back is that genital mutilation of women is still a practice in Guinea.
Today, at a closed hearing in Manhattan’s federal building, she will plead for political asylum from Guinea’s entrenched practice of female genital mutilation, which has marked all the women in her extended family, including her mother.
[…]
Ms. Bah’s mother, Aissatou Dalanda Bah, who has separately applied for asylum, had her clitoris excised by her grandmother with a kitchen knife when she was about 10, the court papers said. Later, she watched helplessly as one of Adama’s cousins bled to death from the procedure.
The Fed had her detained for a while (at age 16!) on the alleged suspicion that she might have been a suicide bomber. Since Her Papers Were Not In Order, she ended up facing deportation problems and wearing an electronic ankle bracelet in addition to having a 10:00 PM curfew.
Though a document provided by a federal agent at the time said the F.B.I. considered the girls “an imminent threat” to national security, it provided no evidence, and officials refused to discuss the matter.
Star chambers, suspension of habeas corpus and “enemy combatants” … Not only is there a truly horrifying desecration of the American ideal afoot here, but now we’re looking at destroying the life of a young woman.
So remember to vote Republican. They keep us all* safe.
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* Wealthy fundamentalist Christian white men.
Spew