STANDING UP

Swedish Activist Stops Afghan’s Deportation With Plane Protest

She refused to sit down on the flight until the man was escorted off the plane.

A student activist aboard a plane at Sweden’s Gothenburg airport blocked the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker by refusing to sit down until he was removed from the flight, The Guardian reports. Elin Ersson, 21, told the newspaper that she hopes her protest prompts people to “start questioning how their country treats refugees… We need to start seeing the people whose lives our immigration [policies] are destroying.” Ersson, who’s majoring in social work, live streamed her protest on the Turkey-bound flight and was met with hostility by some passengers. One man attempted to take her phone away. “What is more important, a life, or your time?” she told him. “I want him to get off the plane because he is not safe in Afghanistan. I am trying to change my country’s rules, I don’t like them. It is not right to send people to hell.” After the Afghan passenger was removed from the flight, the plane broke out into applause.