🚨 The Supreme Court just greenlit secret deportations to countries where people might be tortured or killed.
No notice. No hearing. No process.
In DHS v. D.V.D., Justice Sotomayor's dissent lays it out:
✅ A man was deported to Guatemala after an immigration judge found he'd likely face torture there.
✅ Six others were flown to South Sudan with less than 16 hours' notice, with no chance to raise a claim under the Convention Against Torture.
✅ DHS tried to send 13 people to Libya. The public backlash sparked armed conflict in Tripoli.
All in violation of court orders.
Under U.S. and international law, we can't deport people to countries where they face a serious risk of torture or death. That's not a policy preference—it's the Convention Against Torture, federal law, the Fifth Amendment, and basic human decency. Yet, six Supreme Court Justices have allowed this practice to continue unabated.
THIS IS GOVERNMENT-SANCTIONED HUMAN TRAFFICKING.
Friends and followers: What happens in immigration won't stay in immigration. If one agency can ignore court orders and fast-track life-or-death decisions in violation of the law, what's stopping others?
When the government claims the power to:
Arrest people without meaningful notice,
Detain them without telling lawyers or courts,
Remove them to any country it chooses (even one they've never set foot in),
And do all of it without issuing a formal removal order or allowing a hearing…
…it opens the door to arresting and deporting anyone who "looks undocumented." There's no due process check. No requirement that the person be a citizen of the country they're sent to. No meaningful opportunity to object. In fact, DHS policy forbids officers from even asking whether a person is afraid to be deported.
As Justice Sotomayor warns, this creates a system where: "The Government could designate any location in its initial order, lose before the immigration judge, decline to appeal, and promptly thereafter deport the noncitizen to a country of the Government's choosing."
And if there's no notice? No hearing? No review? Then what's to stop DHS from rounding up anyone who looks deportable—based on their accent, skin tone, clothing, or neighborhood—and shipping them off to a country they have no connection to, with zero accountability?
This is how constitutional rights become conditional. And once they are, they're not really rights at all. This isn't just bad policy. It's a roadmap for racial profiling, indefinite detention, and a total breakdown of the constitutional rights that are supposed to protect every one of us.
We either defend due process for everyone—or we lose it for everyone. Hard stop.
Thanks for starting this Substack. Much needed. — Latha
I get that the SCOTUS has to look at it purely from procedural and legal framing - more so than from that of fairness or human rights. Perhaps they didn't have much of a choice on this one: what if returning migrants to their country of origin makes it worse for them? Is unfeasible? The country no longer exists?
Yet what I find inconceivable is the apparent willful ignorance of the clear consequences of the decision in enabling the current admin to abscond the rule of law and abuse human rights - just as Sotomayor laid out.
Dark times we live in.