(I have left out a lot of things here to just stick to a basic description of some things.)
In February 2022, I finally made a sudden decision to leave the lockdowns. I was able to leave without proof of vaccination, which I had found out on some info online a few months before. I’d decided to go a few days ago, it was my third day in a row at the airport and second buying a ticket before I finally left. I could say more on this decision and how I came to it, but anyway I really felt by that point it was the best thing to do. On the day I felt just lucky that a lady with a whole stack of suitcases piled up above her head was near me. She blocked the view from the flight attendant checking proof of vax status. I used the lady being in the way as an opportunity to cut in line so that I bypassed that flight attendant.
Many things were not right about the flight and everything else. Also, I’d made a promise to myself years ago to never go to Dubai for any reason. Promises to myself are important and I should have remembered to keep them. The stopover was in Dubai and there was another stop at Spain but the one in Spain was one where they just had everyone get out of the aircraft, go through border security, then get back on the same aircraft.
I had almost no plan, and I’d told nobody that I was going. I’d been unsure whether I would even be able to leave. I did have a working visa to Canada, which I’d applied for a couple of years before for mostly unrelated reasons, but they were no longer even allowing entry to unvaxed people. I had a ticket to Mexico, which I had chosen based on its lax entry restrictions, and no other real plan.
When I arrived there, I found that they were unwilling to let me enter with no return ticket, itinerary or hotel booking. It was a fairly standard decision to be expected in a time when few people were traveling. It was my own fault for not planning better and at least having an onward ticket.
But the whole time, many things were not right. And it was increasingly concerning to me that nobody knew where I was. My phone did not have roaming or anything enabled on it, and although I should have at least used the wifi during stopover to contact people I hadn’t done so.
When they went to put me on the return flight to be deported, I had a strong sense like I shouldn’t go and I threw myself on the ground and shouted and screamed. This meant that I ended up on a return flight a day later than the one that they were originally were going to put me on, probably the same flight at the same time the next day. A number of things happened, but in most ways the Mexican airport experience was not too far outside of what you would kind of expect or predict when you are getting deported. However even there, there were some really worrying things that happened. I was in the Mexican airport less than about 36 hours.
I was put in this room just by the border control area, which had a glass wall and glass doors, so you could see in and out. Inside, there were a number of women, who seemed oddly and questionably at home in this room given it must be a totally temporary sort of space for emergency situations. I had a sense they all seemed to be ex prostituted women. They all said they are from Colombia although I don’t truly know if they were really from Colombia. They probably had not met before that day. It was like their journey was long and this was just one day out of many similar days. Whereas I would have expected most people in that room to be experiencing a one-off situation but this did not seem the case. There were two little girls in the room. They were not accompanied by anybody, nor did they seem to be sisters. Normally this would be unusual and concerning, but it was as if it was not strange to the people there. One of the little girls had something drawn on her face. It was like markings making her look like a bunny or kitten, and something about the way it was drawn seemed not right and perverse. At first they were not sitting near me, but later the women and the girls were all sitting closer at the seats by me and the women were talking to me and trying to ask a few questions and we were trying to figure out what each other was saying although they could mainly only speak Spanish. Then the women started encouraging the girls to ask me how to say different words in English and around this time, I got clearer look at this child’s face. The marking was not made by a thin pen as I’d assumed, but scratched into her face. My eyes filled with tears and I looked away and wiped them many times as I tried to talk to them and smile. Nobody else seemed to acknowledge any problem. The markings were very shallow and new. Thankfully they were not permanent but on the very outside layer of skin, and would not scar and would heal in a couple of days. But because the markings would not last long, they also had been not on her face for more than a couple of days. What did that mean, that she had been taken for somewhere terrible just a day or two before, but now was here alone with no apparent carer?
I can’t add all I saw and heard right now as this will get too long. The other horrifying thing was that the security staff just knew way too much information about me (which you would not expect them to be able to get), as well as believing some things that weren’t true. But eventually in the early morning I made an attempt to get the attention of the people who had arrived in the next day’s flights as I was getting really scared and worried and wanted to get away or contact someone. The security people grabbed me but I kept arguing and they let me make a number of calls to numbers I had saved in my mobile, using their phone, but all the calls rang out. They JABBED me with something (not ‘The vax’ but something to make me fall asleep) because they got tired of dealing with me, and they took me to another room which was bare and depressing and had a heavy soundproof door. But they had arranged for me to go on the flight back, the same flight I had refused to go on the day before.
The security people of the Mexican airport varied in their personality and attitude towards me but at least some of them seemed like they were mostly normal people. Whatever was happening, the problems and the agenda didn’t originate in Mexico. Mexican people seemed relatively relaxed and normal, even many of the airport security staff came across that way.