DHS, ICE To Expedite Ejecting Migrants Into Whatever Hellhole Will Have Them

Legal Issues

from the sending-people-to-their-deaths dept

The Trump administration’s maximum cruelty version of immigration enforcement has sent swarms of masked officers to anywhere someone looking kind of foreign might be found. Due process has been eliminated, with the administration relying on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to do its dirty, unconstitutional work for it.

To make things even worse, undocumented migrants aren’t even being sent back to the countries they came from. Instead, planes full of deportees are being sent to places like war-torn South Sudan or, more often, a maximum security concentration camp run by the El Salvadoran government.

Those being deported have reason to fear for their safety when the only options are some of the worst places on earth. Normally, that would allow them to petition courts for removal to their home country or, at least, somewhere less hideous than a country currently hosting a war or a maximum security prison run by a sadistic government.

Even if the Trump administration was willing to entertain these petitions (and it definitely isn’t), it no longer has to concern itself with the well-being of the people it deports. The Supreme Court decided late last month that there’s nothing wrong — constitutionally or otherwise — with engaging in human trafficking of deportees… at least not not that it’s the Trump administration doing it.

The government has always had the power to send deportees to countries they’re not actually from. But the government is supposed to — right up until SCOTUS said otherwise — allow deportees to assess their survival chances in yet another foreign country and give them an opportunity to be deported somewhere less dangerous or, preferably, to the country they came from.

Acting ICE director Todd Lyons — with the backing of the DHS — says any form of due process will be extremely limited, if not ignored completely.

Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in a memo to the ICE workforce Wednesday that a Supreme Court ruling last month had cleared the way for officers to “immediately” start sending immigrants to “alternative” countries.

People being sent to countries where officials have not provided any “diplomatic assurances” that immigrants will be safe will be informed 24 hours in advance — and in “exigent” circumstances, just six. Those being flown to places that have offered those assurances could be deported with no advance notice.

Why is this expedited removal process so extremely necessary migrants will only have less than a day to assess their survival chances in whatever country the US chooses to dump them in? Well, if you believe DHS head Kristi Noem (and you definitely shouldn’t), it’s the only way to keep this country safe.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, whose agency oversees ICE, confirmed on “Fox News Sunday” that the agency had the policy in place. The memo is “incredibly important to make sure we get these worst of the worst out of our country,” she said.

But that’s not what’s happening. It wasn’t even happening nearly a decade ago, when Trump took his first run at eliminating non-white people from the United States. Back in 2017, ICE couldn’t find enough dangerous criminals to deport, so it basically began falsifying arrest numbers to keep the administration’s top bigots satiated.

This time around, there’s been a whole lot more deportation. And with White House advisor Stephen Miller expecting ICE to perform 3,000 arrests a day (the closest it’s come to this point is still several hundred arrests short of that mark), moving a few numbers around isn’t going to work. To accomplish this, ICE has to basically expel every migrant officers come across, which is why nearly two-thirds of people arrested by ICE have no criminal record at all, and nearly every person arrested (93%) by ICE has never been convicted of any violent offenses.

This isn’t the “worst of the worst” being given what they supposedly deserve. This is thousands of people who work hard, pay taxes, and commit fewer crimes than the white people who seem believe they’re operating at a higher human level than people whose skin is darker than theirs.

Filed Under: cruelty, dhs, due process, ice, immigration, kristi noem, mass deportation, todd lyons, trump administration