Outside the Beltway

Indefensible Acts

Cruelty in service of nativist purity.

Steven L. Taylor · Sunday, December 7, 2025 · 3 comments

At some point, the basic judgment of a given policy choice is not some sterile appeal to legality; it is instead the degree to which a choice is humane or not. The inhumanity of the Trump administration’s choice when it comes to deportations is well-documented in this piece in The New Yorker:
Disappeared to a Foreign Prison.

Just months earlier, one of these men had a job with UPS in Chicago. Another had lived in Houston, where he worked for his mother’s catering business, composed R. & B. music, and babysat his little brothers. Some had lived in the U.S. from an early age. Jim, a political refugee, had come to Miami from Liberia in the early nineties, when he was twenty-three, after his parents were murdered for their tribal and political affiliations during the country’s civil war. Others, including a twenty-one-year-old woman who had fled Togo fearing genital mutilation, had arrived in the U.S. recently, seeking asylum.

All of them had been taken from the United States against their will. Nearly all had been granted forms of legal relief that bar the government from deporting them to their home countries. At the heart of the protections they’d received was one of the most basic and sacrosanct concepts in both U.S. and international law: non-refoulement. This principle means that no nation should intentionally deport or expel people to a place where they are likely to face torture, persecution, death, or other grave harms.

These people are all now in detention in Ghana.

Each disappearance was a choice by the federal government of the United States. They do not make us collectively safer. They just terrorize individuals for the crime of being foreign.

But I will stress: other choices could have been made. Different policies could be constructed. None of this is about safety; it is all about pursuing a nativist, racist, and xenophobic ideology.

In April, a Massachusetts federal judge, Brian E. Murphy, issued a preliminary injunction, saying that the government must grant people at least fifteen days to challenge third-country deportations. But two months later the Supreme Court granted a stay, reversing Murphy’s order. (Using the so-called shadow docket, the Court offered no public explanation of its reasoning.) The result is that, for now, D.H.S. can deport people to countries not listed on their removal orders without giving them any notice. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, decrying the government’s “flagrantly unlawful conduct.” Sotomayor wrote, “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution.”

Unless, of course, we are dealing with icky foreigners. In such cases, what’s a little life and death?

On a recent evening, I spoke again to Meredyth Yoon, who told me that another deportation flight from the U.S. to Ghana—she believed it to be the fourth—had just landed. Among the latest deportees was a Maryland nurse named Rabbiatu Kuyateh, who’d lived in the U.S. for roughly thirty years and has never faced criminal charges. Kuyateh had won withholding of removal, convincing an immigration judge that she’d likely face serious harm in her native Sierra Leone. Even so, she was shackled and sent to Ghana, where she and others were held under armed guard at a hotel near Accra. Yoon had been on the phone with Kuyateh and other detainees, she said, when Ghanaian officials came to the hotel and dragged Kuyateh away. They put her on a flight to Sierra Leone.

Just imagine how much safer we all are now!

The Justice Department attorney, Elianis Perez, did not contest the basic fact of the removals. Instead, she insisted that the U.S. had obtained “diplomatic assurances” that Ghana would comply with the Convention Against Torture and other safeguards. Yet one member of the group—a bisexual Gambian man who had been granted protection under CAT by a U.S. immigration judge—had already been returned to his home country.

“How is that O.K.?” the judge, Tanya Chutkan, asked.

“Your Honor, the United States is not saying that this is O.K.,” Perez replied. “What the government has been trying to explain to the court is that the United States does not have the power to tell Ghana what to do.”

Well, sure. After all, the Ghanese government just so happened to magically acquire these persons after we paid them to take them. What’s the US government gonna do about it?

Two days later, Chutkan issued her decision. The deportations “appear to be part of a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly,” she wrote. Even so, she concluded, her “hands are tied.” The court lacked the jurisdiction to prevent Yoon and Gelernt’s clients from being deported by Ghana to their home countries. The resulting policy, Gelernt told me, is “unprecedented and wholly at odds with the humane discretion exercised by past Administrations of both parties.”

I recommend the entire piece, as we should be aware of what is being done in our collective name.