On Saturday morning, CNN hosted 22-year-old Ward Sakeik and her attorney, Eric Lee, in a discussion on the significance of Sakeik’s five-month imprisonment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Sakeik, a stateless Palestinian, was released on Tuesday.
Sakeik faced deportation to the “borders of Israel”—a threat not only of forced exile but of being cast into the zone of an active US-backed genocide that has raged for over 20 months—simply for taking a domestic flight to the US Virgin Islands for her honeymoon.
Since her family fled Saudi Arabia in 2011, Sakeik has lived, worked and come of age in the United States. She is not accused of any crime and has faithfully complied with every demand placed on her by immigration authorities since arriving in the country at the age of eight.
Speaking to CNN on Saturday, Ward Sakeik said, “The entire detention process was not great. I wouldn’t wish this upon anybody. It was very hard, very traumatizing.”
Her attorney Eric Lee explained, “Ward is a Palestinian. The United States government does not recognize Palestine as a country. Her family, like the family of so many Palestinians, was kicked off of their land many decades ago and forced, essentially, into an international diaspora. The government cannot deport her to any country.”
Lee emphasized, as Sakeik had stated before him, that she has complied with every restriction, stipulation and obstacle imposed by the state.
Two days after her release, she held a press conference where she described the dehumanizing and brutal treatment she and hundreds of others have suffered. She recalled being “moved around like cattle” while denied food, water and religious materials. Sakeik also witnessed women being denied medication and forced to sleep on cold, rusty beds.
Even though the facilities were already overcrowded and infested with vermin, Sakeik said more and more people were continually shoved into the increasingly cramped spaces.
Sakeik’s powerful testimony and the criminal character of her incarceration have sparked enormous anger among broad sections of the working class in the US and around the world.
Keenly aware that this growing anger could soon reach a breaking point, the Department of Homeland Security has moved to discredit Sakeik’s testimony. In a statement to Newsweek, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin falsely claimed that “ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE.” McLaughlin contemptuously dismissed Sakeik’s five months of imprisonment as mere “sob stories.”
In response, Lee replied on Saturday, “What we would ask the American people is, who are they going to believe? Their lying eyes or the statements of the people responsible for carrying out what are really crimes against humanity here in the United States.”
Speaking to the criminal character of the US government, Lee explained, “This is a government which is actively undermining and violating the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” He said Sakeik’s case “exemplifies the basic question that everybody should be thinking about on this Fourth of July weekend, which is whether we live in a democracy or whether we live in a dictatorship.”
Lee noted that Sakeik is among the “tens of thousands” of people in the United States now at risk of being disappeared by the Trump administration.
“This is America,” Lee said. “There is a network of internment camps across the United States set up by Democratic and Republican administrations where families are detained, where parents are taken from their children.
“They just built something that they call ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ which is as horrific as it sounds. There are US Marines in Florida helping ICE attack the rights of immigrants in that state, and they have just passed a bill in Congress, which is not ‘beautiful,’ which is going to fund ICE [so] it will have more resources at its disposal than many militaries across the world. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation.”
Lee added that “the situation Ward confronts shows that nobody is safe. They are talking about denaturalizing American citizens. They are trying to enforce what types of speech immigrants can engage in and what types of speech American citizens can listen to immigrants engage in.”
Lee concluded: “That is totally outside the American democratic tradition that was embodied in the Declaration of Independence, which was signed almost 250 years ago.”
The World Socialist Web Site has reported prominently on Sakeik’s case and testimony, which has gone viral on social media. In less than 24 hours, a TikTok post by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) featuring a clip of Sakeik’s harrowing experience was viewed over 75,000 times. Thousands have commented, expressing outrage at her treatment and the broader assault on immigrants.
One commenter wrote: “😔💔💔💔 I am absolutely disgusted with our government and people who are working in these facilities. These are crimes against humanity and ‘I was following orders’ is not a viable defense.”
Another replied bluntly: “We live in a dictatorship.”
“At what point is there going to be an uprising?” asked another, adding, “How far do they have to go before a line is crossed? In my opinion, they crossed that line months ago, yet more and more is still happening, and they seem to be able to just get away with it.”