The Supreme Court Allows Trump Officials to Deport Migrants to “Third Countries”

This is the country that Trump will now be deporting immigrants to. It is astounding that the Supreme Court seems comfortable giving its imprimatur to this idea.

In her scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “the Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard.” She went on to say that, in consequence, the Supreme Court’s intervention in the case could well lead to “exposing thousands to the risk of torture or death.”

Within hours of the ruling, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin confirmed these fears, gloating that it was time to “fire up the deportation planes.”

This is all being done in the name of the American people, in our names. It is a calculated, deliberate deportation of migrants into harm’s way. There is simply no other explanation for why the administration would send anyone to South Sudan. It is the use of atrocious conditions to terrify migrants into either self-deporting or not coming to the US in the first place; it is also, quite possibly, the use of these atrocious conditions to further dehumanize immigrants. After all, it seems inconceivable that the courts would allow for US citizens to be sent to a place the State Department has basically identified as on a par with one of Dante’s circles of hell; if the courts do permanently permit immigrants to be sent there, then doesn’t that legitimize the MAGA ideology that they are lesser beings, vested with lesser rights than are the rest of us and inured to otherwise unendurable conditions? It’s not too different a psychological argument than that used by the Nazis in ghettoizing the Jews, and then further demonizing them and questioning their humanity for their lice-riddled bodies and clothes, their filthy appearances, their manifest poverty after having spent months in those ghettoes.

When I was heading to a hotel in New York City last week, my cab driver kept switching his radio from one hard-right talking head to the next. Each was laser-focused on undocumented immigrants, and each was more bilious than the last. There was Kristi Noem reading aloud a PSA condemning undocumented immigrants for an array of blood-curdling crimes. There was someone else talking about rapist and pedophile migrants. There was someone ranting about immigrants taking jobs and benefits from Americans.

For them, immigrants are bad people—the sort of people who deserve to get bundled onto aircraft and flown half away around the world to be dropped off in a violent country where everything will conspire not just against their chances of success but even against their prospects for survival. For them, all undocumented immigrants are desperadoes, rather than, as most of them are, ordinary people trying to secure safety and education and opportunity, decent wages and clean environments, and steady food supplies for themselves and their families.

Not one of these opinion-shapers mentioned America’s glorious heritage as a country big enough, physically and spiritually, to welcome in migrants by the millions. Not one acknowledged the overwhelming economic and cultural benefits migration has delivered over the centuries.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… and I will give them a one-way ticket to the newest circle of Dante’s hell.” It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as the original “New Colossus” poem, but, I fear, it speaks more honestly to the state of things in the America of 2025.