Trump's Deal with an Authoritarian Hitman

The Trump administration is trying to outsource immigration policy to a dictator who hunts down and murders his political opponents with ruthless assassins.

Image Credit: Payton Tuttle, Unsplash.

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At midnight, on New Year’s Eve, Portia Karegeya messaged her Dad, Patrick, on Skype. There was no reply, which was uncharacteristic. She got worried and contacted David, Patrick’s nephew, who picked up the phone and rang Patrick.

No answer.

“All his phones were off. I thought he had a hangover, but decided to go round to his house and check,” David told the journalist Michela Wrong. Nobody was there. The bed was made. The car was gone. Alarm bells started ringing.

David decided to check a local hotel, the five-star Michelangelo Towers in Johannesburg, South Africa. He knew that one of Patrick’s acquaintances, a fellow Rwandan named Apollo, had been staying there and that the two had been together. Surely Apollo would know where Patrick had gone.

The receptionist told David that nobody had booked under the name “Apollo.” But, surprisingly, someone had booked in under his uncle’s name—Patrick Karegeya—and they were staying in Room 905.

After much cajoling, the hotel staff agreed to check on him in the room. Hanging on the handle was a “Do Not Disturb” sign. The manager had to get involved, heading to the ninth floor at David’s insistence. Finally, he used his keycard, cracked open the door, and saw a man’s legs extending to the edge of the bed, the TV blaring. “The guest is sleeping, sir,” they told David. But in the hours that followed, it became clear that Karegeya’s sleep was permanent.

As Wrong writes in her book Do Not Disturb:

“The duvet was on the floor. Patrick’s three smartphones had all been taken, but Apollo’s travel bag was still there, half-packed with torn and bloodied shirts. Inside the room’s safe, a bloodstained towel and a curtain rope were discovered. After turning the volume on the room’s television up high, one assailant had probably leaned on Patrick’s chest and strangled him with the curtain rope, while another held a towel over his face to muffle any cries. The deed done, the duvet had been thrown over the body, the towel and curtain rope stowed in the safe, and the “Do Not Disturb” sign hooked on the door as the killers left the room.

It had all done the trick. The combination of small touches had bought them more than enough time to reach the airport to make their getaway.”

Patrick Karegeya, a former senior Rwandan government official turned whistleblower, dissident, and enemy of the regime, was likely murdered by his own government’s state-sanctioned assassination squad. When his death became public, Rwandan officials all but admitted their role in the murder. Louise Mushikiwabo, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, tweeted, “It’s not about how u start, it’s how u finish. This man was a self-declared enemy of my Gov & my country, U expect pity?” James Kabarebe, the Defense Minister, agreed: “When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog.”

The killing was almost certainly personally ordered by an authoritarian despot—a charismatic, ruthless autocrat who has carefully positioned himself to be more palatable to Western leaders, sometimes known as “the global elite’s favorite strongman.”

Now, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and the United States government have already begun sending migrants to Rwanda, as part of a larger impending deal that would involve paying large sums to take in those that ICE chooses to deport. As Marisa Kabas first documented, the administration’s apparent first choice for a one-way flight to Kigali was an Iraqi refugee named Omar Abdulsattar Ameen. Five years ago, Ameen was profiled by The New Yorker in a thoroughly reported piece titled “The Fight to Save an Innocent Refugee from Almost Certain Death.”

But this is a tale bigger than Ameen. It’s a story of authoritarians murdering their opponents; of Western governments trying to keep their hands clean while outsourcing their dirty work to a regime that almost never gets covered in the American press; of Trump shipping innocent people to a country in central Africa where they are likely to be abused or trafficked; of egregious White House nepotism; and of ongoing reputational whitewashing that involves migrants to Israel, failed schemes of the British government, and cash flowing to Premier League football teams.