Jamming the expulsion machine: on the events at Malpensa airport, Terminal 1, runway 20 March 2024

by No Cpr Turin

On 20 March they deported Jamal, comrade and friend. The information of his imminent forced deportation came from an insider who still, and perhaps increasingly, believes in communication in solidarity with the outside. They had set a trap for him and little was known of his imminent fate – be it transfer to another CPR (detention center) or deportation.

Once again, we could only attempt the possible and thus discover that possible it is indeed. Seen from the outside, we reiterate, the expulsion machine would like to appear, and be shown, as an unassailable fortress built on the foundations of racism, pulled up with the bricks of social inequities and assembled with the lime of the silence of all those who accept the unacceptable.
Sometimes – and the events in front of the Turin Police Headquarters and on the runway at Malpensa airport are proof of this – little is needed to pull down the dehumanising wall that silences violence and endorses the unacceptable. Sometimes you just have to throw your heart over an emergency door, a turnstile, a panic bar to find yourself at the foot of an aircraft.

Sometimes all you have to do is run along its side, look a pilot in the eye and remind him that he is deporting: that he is making himself part of a racist and iniquitous machine that exists in part thanks to vague obedience and mere indifference.

If on 28 February at the ASL in Via Farinelli in Turin they did not shirk from slavishly fulfilling the role of collaborators of racist violence, allowing Jamal’s detention (and probably that of many before and after him); yesterday a pilot did so – who knows whether shaken by who gave strength to his legs and ran alongside that plane.
That in that plane – contrary to what we thought – the person to be deported was not Jamal matters little. What is worthwhile is to reiterate that the machine of deportations can be jammed, that the creativity born of the impulse of struggle, anger and love can break through the wall of indifference and show the brutal contradictions of the present, naked, evident on a runway. So real that we can only take note of them.

The only thing we can reiterate is that everything that happened in Turin and Malpensa is potentially replicable and reproducible. The fight against the machine of expulsions and administrative detention is possible and real in its goals and prospects.
We know that repression is answered with struggle as the Palestinian resistance teaches us every day.
Not even today’s blows, deportation and imprisonment will stop this struggle and the love that binds us to it.

In the meantime, news has reached us that the hearing to validate the arrest for Josto and Peppe is set for tomorrow morning, at 9.30 a.m. at the Busto Arsizio prison, and at 10.30 a.m. at the Busto Arsizio court for Miriam and Elena.
Updates will follow.

To Jamal, today in Morocco, deported by the state. To his freedom.

To Josto, Ele, Miri, Peppe today in the prisons of Busto Arsizio and San Vittore, accused of resistance, interruption of public service and attack on transport safety, for running alongside that plane. To their freedom.

To write to their comrades:

Miriam Samite and Elena Micarelli
c/o C.C. ‘Francesco Di Cataldo’ (San Vittore), Piazza Gaetano Filangieri 2, 20123, Milan

Josto Jaris Marino and Giuseppe Cannizzo
c/o C.C. di Busto Arsizio, Via Cassago Magnago 102, 21052, Busto Arsizio

Let nothing remain of the CPRs but rubble.
Fire to the jails.
Freedom for all