Freedom march ends in tears: 150 Sudanese refugees imprisoned after fleeing 100 miles to Jerusalem

“No more prison! No more prison!” went one chant. Another: “Refugees' rights right now!”

As evening approached, they made a bold attempt to leave the main roadway and march up toward the Knesset (parliament) building. That's when a few dozen Israeli border cops stepped in, forming a human barricade around the group. All 150 refugees inside the circle either followed the cops' orders willingly or were tackled to the ground, one by one, and dragged onto two jumbo buses waiting to drive them back to their cold desert cells.

Many began sobbing near the end, while others chanted to deaf ears: “Freedom, yes! Prison, no!” A few left-wing Israeli supporters clung to the refugees' jackets, screaming, “They're HUMAN BEINGS!” as border cops ripped them away by their collars. News photographers elbowed past cops to capture the panic and agony in refugees' faces. The Reuters team even jumped onto the roof of a flimsy mobile home parked nearby (part of another man's protest outside Knesset headquarters) to capture the scene from above.

It was one half-hour of heartbreaking chaos — a quick, brutal end to the refugees' arduous journey across wintertime Israel.

“>their prison grounds along Israel's southern border, walking for six hours until they reached the Be'er Sheva central bus station for the night. At that point, tired and weak, some were forced to end their hunger strike. One was hospitalized, and two others treated, for exhaustion.

The next day, the group of 150 refugees and about 20 human-rights workers walked another six hours or so, until they realized they would need to take a bus to make it to Jerusalem by Tuesday morning, as planned. So they shuttled north to Kibbutz Nahshon and spent their second night in an underground bunker. “The migrants, who had marched dozens of kilometers in the last few days, look shocked,” wrote a reporter from Haaretz who stayed with them at the kibbutz. “They sit quietly feeling their aching, blistered feet, some of them bandaged.”

Their injuries had gotten so raw by Tuesday afternoon that a couple refugees collapsed during the Jerusalem demonstration. Another man had what appeared to be a seizure near the end of the protest — but he was so boxed in by tense border police and panicking protesters that it took at least 10 minutes to drag him out of the crowd into an ambulance.

“>passed earlier this month. In fact, the only reason the refugees were able to make their mid-December march at all — finally showing Jerusalem politicians the faces of the innocents they've been squirreling away to no man's land — was thanks to the new law.

The previous Anti-Infiltration Law, in place since early 2012, had allowed Israel to lock up African non-residents in the notorious Saharonim desert prison for at least three years without trial. But in September of this year, the law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Israel. So politicians came up with a seemingly soft alternative: Africans who have been at Saharonim for one year will gradually be transferred to “>Images of the march mirror some of history's most famous exoduses, and certainly conjure a Torah passage or two. “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” read one refugee's small sign.

The entire walk/ride to Jerusalem, Israeli aid organizers kept predicting that border police would probably show up “in a few hours” and arrest the lot of them. Cops and soldiers were indeed trailing the procession the whole time, making their presence known — but for whatever reason, they waited until the final hour to pounce.

At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, when the group was scheduled to arrive in a parking lot across from the Prime Minister's Office, only about seven security guards lingered nearby. Press corps who had gathered on the other side of a barricade were under the impression that the arrest would be quick and easy: “Don't cross the barricade,” a photographer from Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest daily, told me, “so the police will know you're not with them.”

By “them,” he meant the 50 or so “supporters from the left” who were waiting in the parking lot, beneath the giant Bank of Israel building, for the bus of refugees to arrive. The crowd had a very Occupy aesthetic: Drums covered in political stickers, rainbow mittens, an “animal liberation” sweatshirt. Vered Bitan, a freelance graphic designer from Jerusalem wearing cheetah gloves and funky sunglasses, held up a sign that said, in solidarity: “I'm not an infiltrator, I'm a refugee. Refugee is not a crime.” She motioned to the towering “65 years” logo that sits atop of the Prime Minister's Office. “Before, they were all immigrants,” she said of the people inside the office. “They were put in camps. But they forgot it.”

“>on his Facebook page:

Just as we are determined to protect our borders, we are determined to enforce the law. The law exists for everyone. The law is the law, and it certainly applies to illegal work infiltrators. The infiltrators who were transferred to a special facility can stay there, or return to their home countries.

According to a spokeswoman for Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, the prisoners were all bussed back to the “open” Holot detention center last night. This morning they will attend a hearing with an officer from the Ministry of Interior. Most likely, said the spokeswoman, refugees who were gone for under 48 hours will stay at Holot, and those gone for over 48 hours will go back to Saharonim.

On December 15, Hotline and partner organizations submitted a petition to the Supreme Court to overturn the new Anti-Infiltration Law. The government now has until December 25 to comment on the request for interim injunction.

For more on the refugees and their current living conditions, see: “