What Jock saw from the plane was burning trash: as dusk draws in, Juba’s residents burn batteries, leaves, and plastic bags in smoldering fires that produce little cumulus clouds above the city. But basic services were lacking, and there was little in the way of waste disposal. A decade of rapid urban growth then brought an almost endless supply of Toyota Land Cruisers to satiate the desires of corrupt politicians and overpaid humanitarians. When Sudan’s earlier civil war came to an end in 2005, Juba was an embattled stockade town, surrounded by rebel forces. “We were on Con Air, and we were descending into a warzone.” When the plane finally touched down, it was eerily quiet. From the air, he could see smoke clouds issuing from fires burning across the city. As the plane prepared to land in Juba, though, Jock thought he was finally going to see the war up close. Jock’s father would tell him stories about the conflict in South Sudan they felt distant to a young man struggling to make ends meet. Old enmities were soon rekindled, and in 2013 the SPLM split, plunging South Sudan into a new civil war that left nearly four hundred thousand people dead. International donors poured money into the country, and oil revenue flowed into government coffers. South Sudan, its president declared, was a blank slate. During the war, the Sudanese government had run a counterinsurgency operation on the cheap by setting southern Sudan’s many ethnic groups against each other, in an attempt to fracture the rebels. The world’s youngest country had joyfully declared its independence from Sudan in 2011, after more than two decades of a brutal civil war (1983–2005) between the Sudanese government and a guerrilla force, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), largely based in southern Sudan. What Jock did know about South Sudan made him nervous. People had come to America with less, he thought.Īs the plane prepared to land in South Sudan, Jock thought he was finally going to see the war up close. They wanted to write him a check, he told me, “but what am I going to do with a check here?” When the plane stopped to refuel in Kenya, an ICE officer slipped Jock twenty bucks for the sandals. Jock “knew it was going to be hot as hell here,” so in Cook County jail, he had taken some sandals, which ICE subsequently lost. On the deportation flight, as the plane banked down toward Juba, he gripped the twenty-dollar bill in his pocket. In South Sudan, even those with extensive family networks struggled to survive. Before his arrival in Juba, he had understood little about South Sudan, a country close to the bottom of many global indexes, except for corruption (in 2019, Transparency International ranked it the second-most corrupt country in the world) where life expectancy was just under fifty-six years, two million people were internally displaced due to conflict and flooding, and more than half the population was severely food insecure. That hope ended with removal, the legal term for the moment at which America decides it wants nothing more to do with you. Jock hoped he might be able to stay in America. That’s not nothing, not when life is lived suspended between countries, the calendar shows only the next court appearance, and the threat of deportation hangs over every morning in the yard. In El Paso, he could get a nice iced tea from the canteen. That was where the prisoners were beaten, he said. ICE had picked him up in Cook County, Illinois. I had assumed that all prisons would be the same-a monotony of sad cells and bad food-but Jock insisted on the particularity of his memories. “I’ve been all over America,” Jock told me, as he recounted his prison tour: Arizona, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, New York, and Texas. Prior to his deportation in 2019, Jock had spent two years in the limbo of ICE custody, constantly moved between jails as his case shuffled through the courts. After ICE removes someone’s fetters, Jock told me, staring into the White Nile, “they wipe them down, and use them on the next deportee.” It was September 2021, and we were sitting in one of Juba’s riverside bars. He “wanted the waiting to end,” he said, and to “get the shackles off.” They remained on for the long flight that had taken Jock from Louisiana to Juba, the capital of South Sudan-a country that hadn’t even existed when he left Africa in 1994, merely three years old, and entered the United States. By the time Immigration and Customs Enforcement had amassed enough passengers to fill up a deportation flight to East Africa, Duol Tut Jock was ready to leave.
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