On "Safe" Countries
And other (uncomfortable) political fictions, at home and abroad
We talk about US attacks on transgender people, asylum seekers and immigrants, and foreign countries as mostly separate items in our news feeds. But if we put them together and look at the international reaction, a powerful and frightening story emerges. These attacks are not discrete events, but a pattern that connects us from colonial violence to the current right-wing radicalization happening in the US and elsewhere.
Last week a friend from the American deep south wrote (carefully and fearfully, as many must do now, so let’s call him Alex) about a Canadian program offering a year of housing and resettlement support to new LGBTQI+ refugees who are identified by the UN or the Rainbow Railroad. Alex mentioned the hope and excitement that it stirred, how many transgender people in the US south were hoping that they might be one of the lucky ones that Canada would accept.
Many did not know to read the fine print: the Rainbow Railroad is constrained by the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, and the United States is still designated as a “safe country” alongside places like Iceland, Canada, and Western Europe–and so transgender Americans are ineligible for referral, despite advocacy from the Rainbow Railroad themselves:
Rainbow Railroad joins refugee and LGBTQI+ rights advocacy groups calling for the Minister of Immigration to make an exception to the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) for transgender, non-binary, and intersex refugee claimants in the U.S. to seek asylum in Canada.
In the same week, another friend (let’s call him Ted) from the US north wrote that a young asylum applicant has given up and is going home to a war-ravaged country because he cannot wait any longer and doesn’t hope any longer that his application for asylum will be granted and that his wife and young child, still trapped in grave danger, might join him. The young man walked to Canada to plead for help and was returned to the US. He is resourceful, kind, and had a deep emotional impact on Ted. Now Ted’s young friend will return home to a place where friends and family members have died, are dying.
The young man wrote to Ted to say thank you. Ted, who does not pray, is praying anyway.
This morning, reports began to roll in that the US has conducted a military strike in Venezuela, and the Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez has “confirmed casualties among Venezuelan civilians and military personnel.” The Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Florez are described as “kidnapped” or “captured,” depending on the source. Note that I am not here to hold court on Maduro; there is widespread evidence of voter suppression and the imprisonment or vanishing of dissidents. There is also widespread evidence that US interventionism in the global south and the Middle East are destabilizing and do not improve the safety or quality of life for people in those regions.
We often forget (or are never taught) that US intervention in Afghanistan, including early support for the religious extremists that eventually became the Taliban and that US forces were later deployed to subdue them, began in the late 1970s. Steve Coll of Ghost Wars also broadly covers U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and support for the factions that later became the Taliban, all beginning far before 9/11, in Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden (2004). The US was largely motivated by a desire to both maintain their own energy resources in the region and to prevent the Soviet Union from expanding its influence and resources.
The British, who framed colonial exploitation and control of assets as “the great game” in the 19th century, were similarly concerned with the impacts on oil resources and international power balance that Soviet-aligned administration of the country might alter.
Afghans now live largely in a state of extreme repression, having been colonized, manipulated, occupied, and now left struggling to recover from both occupation and the far-right movements that were either directly cultivated by interventionism or moved to fill the power vacuum it created. (Note that this is unequivocally not an argument for continued or increased occupation in the name of liberation, which is largely colonizer window-dressing).
History provides little evidence that it is possible to “liberate” someone else’s home without their consent and at the end of a gun. The aim is almost always to subdue or to pilfer.
“Consent” is key–it is a violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter to use force or even threat of force where it violates another country’s independence. And, aside from the opposition, there is no legitimate structural internal appeal present in Venezuela requesting “help” from the US–nor would such a request likely take the form of extradition to a foreign territory for prosecution under US laws that largely conflict with international regulation regarding the immunity of sovereigns from this type of prosecution, with very few exceptions.
The irony of Trump, who himself has sought and functionally won significant expansions to his own immunity, violating this international standard is very much worth noting. The UN-Secretary General himself has invoked this article and expressed serious concern that it sets “a dangerous precedent.”
Regardless of Venezuelan’s feelings about their president’s legitimacy, they have repeatedly and clearly rejected intervention and tend to disagree with the methods of Maduro’s leadership far more than with the left-leaning alignment of the country’s values–a sharp contrast from the opposition’s praise of Trump. Politico reported in November that Machado “hoped Venezuela’s success would lead to freedom for Cuba and Nicaragua, and predicted if Venezuela became a democracy then the country could open investment on oil, gas, mining and gold.”
And news is now breaking that Trump is claiming that the US will “run Venezuela” following the capture of Maduro, presumably until someone who satisfies US interests can be voted in (or installed).
I cannot help but think of Chile under Pinochet and the US participation in the coup that ended with the democratically elected Allende’s death, vividly described in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine as well as direct survivor accounts and documentations of disappearances, stadium detentions, and other records available via the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos (https://ww3.museodelamemoria.cl/english/). Under Pinochet, students were disappeared for protesting bus fares and dissidents were gathered in stadiums.
The folk musician Victor Jara was detained in Estadio Chile, had his fingers and hands broken, and was executed shortly after the coup (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20130912-victor-jara-the-singer-who-died). The US economist Milton Friedman whose adherents–”the Chicago Boys”-- engineered the economic “reforms” that followed the coup and left Chile with profound wealth inequality was, like Machado, given a Nobel prize.
We should be sharply critical and have a very clear-eyed understanding of what it means for the US to unilaterally embargo and seize another country’s oil freighters despite broad international condemnation and then blow up at least thirty boats carrying human beings. The current US administration has seemingly extrajudicially killed real people deserving of at minimum some form of due process under the largely unsupported pretext that they were all smuggling drugs, and then ran off with Venezuela’s president and his wife so that both can face, as Pam Bondi put it, the “full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts”
The idea that justice is delivered by wrath does not make sense to me, ethically, but it does make sense in the context of the country that in 1944 killed fourteen year old George Stinney by electric chair when he was so small that he required a book to prop him up and is now working to prevent students from learning that type of history in its classrooms. It also makes sense in the direction that we are headed now, where the attorney general of my country has, via the justice department, directed the FBI support the bounty hunting of domestic terrorists and included in their definition of domestic terrorist those who support “radical gender ideology”--in other words, transgender people and advocates
Simply put, the term “safe country” has been applied, in the refugee context, to countries which are determined either as being non-refugee-producing countries or as being countries in which refugees can enjoy asylum without any danger.
The UNHCR further clarified in 2021 that “The designation of a safe third country needs to be based on reliable, objective and up to date information from a range of sources. Also, the process of adding or removing a country from a list of designated ‘safe third countries’ must be transparent, open to legal challenge, and reviewable in light of changing circumstances. “
I live in an America that is building non-voluntary homeless work camps while generating increased vulnerability to homelessness, where the protections of naturalization are under threat and women are dying in increasing numbers due to catastrophic reproductive health bans (https://thegepi.org/maternal-mortality-abortion-bans/) while transgender residents are pathologized and denied care by decree, and where simply being transgender is enough in some states to risk losing custody of your children. Meanwhile, the same US administration terminated the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline’s LGBTQ youth service in June of 2025.
And yet the US is, somehow, still listed as a “safe” country, preventing LGBTQI+ residents and others in imminent peril from seeking asylum elsewhere. Instead, we are to head for “safer” internal regions, even as attacks on medicaid and the rights of states undermine the safety of even progressive regions.
States rights, it seems, are closely held when they align with the racist and sexist bigotry and religious extremism at the core of American fascism, but of no material interest when the rights, interests, and autonomy of residents in those states conflict with the ideological agenda of our current regime.
There are many places in the world less safe than the United States, and many of those places have been made less safe by the United States and other countries made wealthy by colonialism and the continued existence of a financial system that keeps poor people under someone else’s boot because they have been stripped clean—for oil, for cheap labor, for foods that Americans like to eat, for geopolitical and economic supremacy.
But why, in this context, are the victims of US collapse and extremism being denied the possibility of sanctuary? And why is there such care for American political feelings when the US steals another country’s president? I can’t say with certainty, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than a little bit about the size of the US military and nuclear arsenal.
I call on the conscience of those who well know the history of fascism and the toll it exacts on those it targets for repression and eventual eliminations–religious and ethnic minorities, LGBTQI+ people, disabled people, migrants, people of color, socialists and others of political conscience–please do not allow there to be any longer a pretense that this country is “safe.” Silence keeps no one safe; it is only when we stand together for the dignity and autonomy of lives lived beyond our own communities that we begin to move towards a justice that is not based in enmity or “wrath” but conscience and solidarity with others.