The facts, per Reuters reporting: the US flew 20 so-called third-country deportees to Liberia this week — the first of a planned 1,200. Five of them — three Cuban men, a Brazilian man and a Cameroonian woman, all holding US immigration-court rulings that they risked torture or abuse if sent to their home countries — refused to get off. Authorities told them the plane would take them back to the US. It flew to Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, instead, where the five were forced off against their will and are now detained in a decommissioned hotel with 35 other US deportees. * The New York Times headline on this: "5 Deportees Are Flown by US to Equatorial Guinea After they Resist Deplaning in Liberia." * Deplaning. The word from the end of a Ryanair flight, right before the seatbelt chime — 'please remain seated until the aircraft has come to a complete stop, then deplane by rows.' People 'resist deplaning' when they want one extra minute of air conditioning. What these five resisted was being deposited in a country they had never agreed to, that most had no connection to — and the response, per Reuters' sources, was a false promise about the destination and a forced removal one border further away. * Look at the causal spine of that headline, too. 'Flown to Equatorial Guinea AFTER they resist' — their resistance comes first, the flight follows, and the sentence quietly becomes a consequence: they did a thing, so a thing happened to them. The deception — the part where officials allegedly said 'we're taking you to the US' and didn't — appears nowhere in it. In headline grammar, the government responded; in the reporting, the government misled. * To be fair to the grammar police's usual suspects: Reuters' own wire headline was no lion either — 'Migrants flown to Equatorial Guinea after resisting Liberia deportation under Trump deal, sources say' — passive, agent optional, though at least the deal's owner made the sentence. And DHS, asked about all this, offered the quote of the week: the migrants 'were deported to a safe third country... Period.' The 'safe third country' currently houses them in a shuttered hotel where, per Reuters, detainees face inadequate medical care and no access to lawyers. * Here's what makes the Times' word choice genuinely frustrating rather than just clumsy: the paper is doing real work on this story. Its own newsroom, same week, pried loose the receipts — 'U.S. Agreed to Pay Liberia $5 Million in Connection with Deportees, Documents Say.' The digging is happening. And then the headline desk dressed a forced transfer of torture-protected people in the language of a boarding-gate announcement. * Yesterday we wrote about deportees who went 'back to homeland' in a Washington Post headline — to a capital their own government won't let American planes land in. The euphemisms are forming a fleet. Every one of them does the same job: it moves the sentence from what was done to people onto what the people failed to do — comply, disembark, deplane. The seatbelt sign is off. The word means nothing here.