Just when you are tempted to assign sole blame for our growing reputation as human rights abusers to President Donald Trump and his misbegotten administration, up steps the Supreme Court of the United States.
In an emergency ruling Monday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to resume uncontested deportation of immigrants to countries that are not their nations of origin, where they may be subjected to further human rights abuses and persecution.
The ruling, which was not signed by the justices, does not make a determination on the legality of the process itself — the court will begin hearing arguments on that question in December. Nevertheless, it was, according to the New York Times, being celebrated as a victory by the Trump administration, which has deported more than 25,000 migrants to 29 “third countries.”
Yet, for those of us who look to our judicial system as a means to ensure this White House doesn’t get away with every human and civil rights violation it can think of, the court’s decision is deeply troubling.
“In granting the stay, the court has cleared the way for DHS to disappear individuals overnight and transport them to countries without notice.”
Sarah H. Paoletti, the director of the Transnational Legal Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, says the order is “yet one more example of the Supreme Court majority ceding exceptional deference to the Executive.”
“In granting the stay, the court has cleared the way for [the U.S. Department of Homeland Security] to disappear individuals overnight and transport them to countries without notice, and without the opportunity to be heard on their fear-based claims as to those countries, with callous disregard to the grievous rights violations they are likely to face,” Paoletti said via email.
Paoletti noted that the court’s ruling came on the same day 20 independent human rights experts appointed as U.N. Special Rapporteurs and a Special Rapporteur of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights condemned the practice of third-country removals.
Malka Older — writer, sociologist, aid worker, and executive director of Global Voices, the international newsroom made up of writers and human rights activists — sees the harms as part of a pattern of unethical national choices.
“The Supreme Court allowing the government to continue removing immigrants to third countries — countries where they know no one, have no safety net, no connections, no assistance, and may be under active threat for their identity or convictions — is allowing irreparable harm to continue being done to those people,” Older told me via Facebook. “This kind of deportation rips apart people’s lives, leaving them stranded, and it demonstrates the moral vacuity of U.S. policy, pushing people off somewhere else as though that absolves us of all responsibility.”
“It is the same dynamic that sees the U.S. export plastic waste, dangerous industrial byproducts, unappealing jobs, and increasingly data centers, hoping that if people can’t see the harm they’ll pretend it isn’t happening but in this case, the harm is happening very directly to human beings, to our neighbors.”
“[I]t demonstrates the moral vacuity of U.S. policy, pushing people off somewhere else as though that absolves us of all responsibility.”
The administration releases no real information about who it has sent to third countries, and it has reportedly started vanishing thousands of detainees held for deportation from DHS’s online detainee locator system. According to the most reliable tracking data, however, more than 70% of current detainees have no criminal convictions (and, lest we forget, even people who have been criminally convicted have rights).
But anecdotally, and through the work of journalists here at The Inquirer and at other media organizations, we know that most of those being detained for deportation — even to third countries — are mostly just ordinary human beings.
“There are people who have lived in this country for upwards of 30 years who are being deported because they lack residency,” Guatemalan-born and Brooklyn-based author and translator David Unger said via Facebook.
“My daughter, an immigration lawyer, had a Jamaican client who was deported to Eswatini in Africa and held incommunicado for three months before finally being sent to Jamaica, where he has no living relatives,” he added. “Guatemala has accepted 2,000 deportees originally from Mexico. Who knows what danger they may be in when they finally reach their birth land. This is simply cruel and, possibly, lethal to them.”
Trump is fond of repeating that our nation is the hottest country in the world right now, but what I see is that we’re radioactive. Our ranking in the Human Rights Measurement Initiative rights tracker, which compares us with our peer high-income countries and fellow members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is pretty terrible: 3.7 out of 10. And a number of the categories in which we are dead-last — “freedom from torture and ill-treatment,” “freedom from arbitrary arrest,” and “freedom from forced disappearance” — are tied directly to the administration’s mass deportation plan.
You know what to do. Thirty-three days from now, get yourself to a polling place and elect people willing to limit the executive branch’s morally disgraceful inclinations. And come December, pray the Supreme Court is willing to limit it, too.