The shadow docket strikes again, as the NYT reports: Supreme Court Allows Rapid Third-Country Deportations, for Now.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday gave President Trump a temporary victory on a central piece of his mass deportation agenda, agreeing the administration can, for now, resume rapidly deporting immigrants to countries other than their own.

Although the justices cleared the way for the policy to continue, they also announced that the court would fast-track the case and hear oral arguments about it in December, setting up a final ruling on the issue next year and a new test for presidential power at the court.

[…]

Trina A. Realmuto, a lawyer for the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and part of the team representing the immigrants, called the emergency decision “a devastating result.” The court, she said in a statement, “has allowed the administration to resume sending people to third countries where they face persecution or torture.”

That the “Justices” (I am to the point where that title seems grossly inappropriate) cannot see fit to at least continue to stay this process until arguments can be presented to determine its legality is just another example of the cruelty and disrespect for due process that has become a hallmark for all too many on the political right.

I recognize that there are circumstances in which third-country may be necessary and appropriate, but such examples should be limited to truly dangerous persons, and even then, dumping someone in a foreign prison without due process is a human rights violation, full stop.

In basic terms, the United States government is contracting with dictatorships around the world to take persons that ICE determines shouldn’t be in the country, even if there is a court order and paperwork to prevent their deportation, and hold them indefinitely.

This last week, an episode of The Daily told the story of Roberto Mosquera, a 59-year-old Cuban who came to the US as a 12-year-old. He joined a gang as a teenager and took a plea deal over a series of crimes that led to a 9-year prison sentence. He was not deported to Cuba due to the court determined it would be unsafe for him.

The idea was that if Roberto tried to stay out of trouble and made check-ins with immigration authorities, usually every year, he’d be able to get a work permit, get a driver’s license, basically have a normal life in the United States.

In other words, he was legally allowed to stay and work in the United States. And he has, in fact, stayed out of trouble. He became a plumber and started a family. He has four daughters.

He was detained at his mandated annual ICE check-in.

He was held in detention for several weeks and then deported to the African country of Eswatini (which used to be called Swaziland). Eswatini is an absolute monarchy that does not recognize basic civil liberties and rights. He currently resides in a prison in that country and does not know when, or if, he will ever get out.

Where is the justice in any of this? (There is none.)

Who is being made safer by this? (No one.)

People can argue that Roberto came to the US illegally as a child, which is true. They can argue that he should not have gotten involved in a gang and committed crimes. And people can even assert that there is some moral failing in allowing previous criminality to be rewarded by ultimately allowing him to stay and work. And maybe in some dorm room philosophy chat that might be true.

But there is no moral argument to be made that the US is, in any way, better off having a 59-year-old plumber in jail in Eswatini instead of back in the US, fixing leaking sinks, paying taxes, and taking care of his daughters (the youngest of which is 10 years old).

Being in the US illegally and even committing crimes that result in jail time does not justify being deported to a life sentence in prison in a dictatorship on the other side of the planet. And even if he were released tomorrow, where would he go? He can’t possibly have a passport. He can’t get back into the United States. He certainly lacks local means to survive.

This is all an utter nightmare, and it is courtesy of the United States Government. The US has paid Eswatini $5.1 million to house deportees.

In our name, this government has done similar things thousands of times.

There’s an organization called Third Country Deportation Watch. And the big number is an estimate of 25,000 people who have been sent through third countries to be deported.

[…]

Now, the 25,000 figure aren’t all people in Roberto’s situation. And a large number of those people, most of them, were sent to Mexico, largely immediately after they came over and usually not to prisons. But there’s a subset of the cases, and I’d estimate this is probably about 5,000 people who were being sent to many different places, often maximum-security prisons, sometimes hotels for weeks, sometimes months at a time. These people were sent all over the world.

And we talked about there being a precedent for sending people to places like Canada. Well, now the US is sending people to countries with active conflicts, mill of wars in some cases. And just recently, “The Times” reported that detainees who were sent to Equatorial Guinea, which is another country notorious for human rights violations, they were being beaten in a hotel by guards who had custody of them.

Here’s the site: Third Country Deportation Watch.

All of this represents unconscionable violations of basic human rights. For justice to prevail, a punishment must fit the crime. Simply being in the US illegally should not be enough to be ripped from your life and sent to a foreign prison, or even to have to eke out an existence in a country you have never been to. Even having a criminal record does not justify this kind of treatment. This is largely a slow-motion execution in the name of “justice,” but where the real goal is just ethnic cleansing.

And yet, SCOTUS (or, at least, the “conservative” majority) is happy to allow this to continue, and will probably give it a big thumbs up after they use their wizarding powers to come up with the appropriate justification after they
“hear” “arguments” before the Court in December.

In simple terms, let me conclude with the following summation. What this policy does is utterly disregard individual human lives in service of broader ideological white nationalist goals. It eschews a foundational element of liberal democracy: due process of law, and it does so while actively lying to us all that these policies are aimed at the “worst of the worst.”

They claim to be protecting us by sending plumbers to prisons in hellholes on the other side of the Earth.