There’s a man in Liberia. He isn’t from there. He doesn’t know anybody there. He has no money, no phone, no extra clothes and no knowledge whatsoever of the country. He was forced off the plane into Liberia and left there. He is one of many immigrants being deported to countries unfamiliar to them as a part of third-country deportations. Many of such immigrants are sent to countries where they are imprisoned, beaten or left homeless with little to no rights. Horrifyingly, the United States Supreme Court just voted that subjecting them to such treatment is allowed.
Third country deportation has been a concept in immigration for many years, but legally, immigrants who aren’t able to return to their home countries out of fear of persecution or violence have 30 days to designate the country they will be deported to. Under Trump’s immigration policy, they no longer have this right. Trump decided to ignore that right in a revolting attempt to further harm immigrants, and what’s worse is that the Supreme Court went along with it.
This policy is especially disgusting because third country deportations are being used to evade international provisions and find a way to mass remove immigrants. Many of the immigrants who are facing deportations to a third country are protected under the UN Convention Against Torture or in the middle of an asylum plea, meaning they can’t be sent to their home country. These immigrants should be granted a temporary stay in the United States, but in a desperate attempt to rid our country of diversity, Trump’s immigration office has found a way to remove them.
Since Trump took office in his second term, more than 25,000 immigrants have been deported to 35 different countries. They have no connection to those countries, often no identification or any help once they step foot off the plane.
This means immigrants can be shipped off to any of the 35 countries, which generally take them in exchange for large sums of money. They could end up on a foreign continent, in a place where they don’t speak the language, in a country that is formally recognized as a dictatorship or in a place where they will be immediately jailed, and the United States government is literally paying millions of dollars to send them there.
In one such instance, immigrants from Venezuela refused to get off a place in Liberia, fearing the unknown land and situation. Federal agents attempted to force them off the plane, before they agreed to supposedly take them back to America. Later they were thrown off the plane in Equatorial Guinea, a known dictatorship, where they were jailed for the next few months.
In third country deportations, like the one described above, there is little to no hope for the immigrants. They are not legal citizens of the countries they reside in. They don’t understand the immigration laws and policies in those countries, and even if they did, they don’t have money for lawyers. They are indefinitely stuck in another country with no idea when they will be able to leave or see their families again.
If the literal abandonment and mass removal of an entire ethnicity of people wasn’t enough, when a lawsuit arose against third country deportations without choice, the Supreme Court ruled to allow them.
This ruling is quite frankly a disgrace.
The judiciary branch does not swear an oath to the president, or to a political agenda. The Supreme Court swears an oath to uphold the Constitution and to administer justice with respect to persons, grant equal right to the poor and the rich within the borders of the United States. They do not swear an oath to protect the rights of only citizens. They do not swear an oath to protect the rights of people of certain ethnicities. They swear an oath to protect the rights of all people living within the borders of the US, but in practice, they do not.
This a major violation of the rights of immigrants. The government won’t even give them the dignity of deciding where they will be forced out to after imprisoning and mistreating them, but this comes in a long line of situations in which the Supreme Court isn’t protecting people, they’re protecting their own self-interest.
Thousands more people will be left stranded in foreign land. Thousands more people will be imprisoned. Thousands more people will have their fundamental rights ignored. Thousands more families will be ripped apart.
How much more must happen before the Supreme Court decides they care?