Swede Blocks Afghan Man’s Deportation by Refusing to Sit Down on Flight

By Palko Karasz

• July 25, 2018

LONDON — A Swedish student activist stopped the deportation of an Afghan man this week by refusing to sit down on a packed Turkish Airlines flight, and her video of the tense standoff has gone viral.

The student, Elin Ersson, whose Facebook page says she is a student at the University of Gothenburg, had found out that the 53-year-old man was being deported and bought a ticket for the same flight at Landvetter Airport in Gothenburg on Monday night, according to news reports.

Ms. Ersson, 21, live-streamed the standoff on the flight to Istanbul on Facebook, and footage of the 14-minute video shows her in tears, at times being confronted by crew members and angry passengers. But she also garnered some support.

“I’m not going to sit down until this person is off the plane,” she says in the video. “Because he is most likely to get killed if he is on this plane when it goes up.”

The man’s identity was not immediately released, nor were further details about his background or his deportation.

In narrating the video — which had 2.6 million views of Wednesday afternoon — Ms. Ersson says that people were trying to snatch her phone and that flight attendants instructed her to sit down. At one point a male voice could be heard calling her “frightening” and telling her to think of the children on the flight.

“I am doing what I can to save a person’s life,” she responds. “As long as a person is standing up, the pilot cannot take off. All I want to do is stop the deportation and then I will comply with the rules here. This is all perfectly legal, and I have not committed a crime.”

In the end, both the Afghan man and Ms. Ersson were taken off the plane.

Swedavia, the company that runs Sweden’s main airports, said the flight was delayed for about two hours. A representative for Turkish Airlines said no one was immediately available for comment on Wednesday.

The Swedish police said that they were investigating the episode but that they would not immediately discuss any details.

News reports said Ms. Ersson was likely to face legal action for refusing to obey a pilot’s orders, and that the man’s deportation would probably be carried out later.

It is not the first act of resistance against the deportation of migrants from Europe and the United States. Some pilots in Germany have refused to fly rejected asylum seekers out of the country. Virgin Atlantic has said it would no longer assist the British authorities in flying undocumented immigrants out of the country.

And United Airlines and American Airlines have asked the Trump administration not to use their planes to fly migrant children separated from their parents at the border.

Related Coverage

Airlines Ask Government Not to Use Their Flights to Carry Children Separated at the Border

June 20, 2018

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Europe Is Called ‘Willfully Blind’ to Risks Afghan Deportees Face

Oct. 5, 2017

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Their Road to Turkey Was Long and Grueling, but the Short Flight Home Was Crueler

June 16, 2018

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