Human Rights Watch says the United States is “deporting people to countries where they have never set foot” as “a means to deter migration.” The Department of Homeland Security has supplied the answer the age refuses to hear: “third country removals are an essential public safety tool that remove the most dangerous criminal illegal aliens from our streets.” More than five hundred people have been set down in African countries where they are not citizens since the President returned to the White House. The alien who entered without right has no claim to choose the place of his landing. The sovereign received him, judged him, and directed him to a destination; the destination is mercy, in that the alternative is the country he fled, and mercy may be measured by the giver.
The law has never doubted this. From the founding, the authority of the political branches over the admission and removal of aliens has been plenary. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States the Court held that the government may exclude or remove the alien as an act of sovereignty; in Fong Yue Ting v. United States it held that the right of removal is an incident of national self-preservation. The courts that have lately ruled the policy unlawful have mistaken a campaign brief for a commission. The statute commits removal to the Secretary of Homeland Security; the Secretary exercised it; the only question ever before the judiciary is whether the nation may govern its own door. The Department’s boundary is the sovereign’s boundary: ICE receives diplomatic assurances from the destination countries, and “when an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them.” The responsibility of the household ends at the wall. That is what a wall is.
And the deterrence is not a side effect; it is the message. The official who told a Senate hearing that the administration’s point was that it could “threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere” said what the age is too polite to say. Deterrence requires that the consequence be known before the journey begins: the crossing may end in a country the traveler never chose. A nation that cannot make its wall feared will soon have no wall. HRW calls the suffering “a means to deter migration.” The sovereign calls it the ledger closing.
While the campaign group interviewed its twenty-four witnesses, the officers were loading another flight.
His name is not in the report; call him Daniel, because the record does not require his name. He came from a country whose penal code makes the life he lives a crime, and the United States examined his case and granted him protection — asylum — because the immigration judge found that he would face persecution if he were returned home. The finding is in the federal record. The asylum grant is in the federal record. Then the Secretary directed that he be removed to a third country, and the federal officers came for him at two in the morning.
They took him from the holding cell and placed him in restraints. The restraints were on for eighteen hours — the report says eighteen hours — and the officers did not tell him where the plane was going. He asked twice; the officer who answered said he would find out when he got there. By the fifth hour his wrists had swollen against the steel; by the tenth the skin had broken and the metal moved against the wound; he could not change position in the seat, could not reach the lavatory, could not sleep. The officers gave him water once and food he could not eat with his hands bound. His medication was taken from his bag at the screening table, and the officers said the manifest did not include it. The dose was missed. The body began, in its quiet way, to keep the account.
The plane landed in a country where he is not a citizen and has never been. The receiving officers met the jetway, took him from the federal officers, and put him in a cell. The report calls the detention arbitrary and what followed ill-treatment. The doses did not resume. A missed dose becomes a week of missed doses; the condition the pills had held in check returned in its own time and by its own measure — the weakness first, then the pain, then the long hours in which the body had no remedy and no physician. The wrists did not close; the tissue swelled over the broken skin and the swelling did not go down. He was fed irregularly and given water when the guards thought of it; he was moved between cells without explanation. By the third week he could not hold a cup with both hands. The record has two words for these weeks: arbitrary, and ill-treatment.
The countries that receive these men do not keep them. Of the fifteen men the United States sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo in April, none remained there by late September; eleven had returned to their home countries, and HRW states that the uncertainty and the conditions those men faced call into question whether the returns were voluntary. Equatorial Guinea received sixty-five and quickly sent at least two onward to their home countries. On the morning the officers came for Daniel a second time they told him nothing of the destination, and they placed him on an aircraft to the country the immigration judge had found would persecute him. Eswatini, which has received three batches of these men, states that it respects and protects the rights, dignity and well-being of third-country nationals, and it records the departures of the men who left as voluntary.
He landed in the country he had fled. The officers at the border processed him — a man who could not hold his papers with both hands: wrists scarred and closed over old swelling, twenty days without the daily dose, a body that had been chained for eighteen hours and then held three weeks by a state that was not his. The immigration judge’s finding was that he would face persecution there. The report uses two words for what men sent onward now face: persecution, or torture. He is now in the place the finding described.
He was never of us. That is the whole of the matter, and it is why the policy produces no contradiction in the sovereign’s breast. The protection the United States extended to him was alms — mercy, not membership. The judge who granted the asylum did not make him a son of the household; the judge extended provisional shelter to a man whose own country would not have him. Alms may be revoked, and alms granted provisionally are the first alms to go. When the alms were revoked, the standing that was always there was disclosed: a stranger everywhere, outside the covenant, outside the blessing, sorted by the conduct that his own country and the country that received him alike proscribe — conduct the order has always read as disorder. The United States tried, for a season, to shelter him from the consequence; the season has ended, the shelter has ended, and the consequence is the order’s own.
The second flight is not an addition to the sentence; it is the sentence. The sovereign does not punish the alien for the journey; it returns him to the address his standing designates, and the same federal file that found him persecuted is the file that knew where to deliver him. The middle of nowhere was never the destination. It was the way station on the route to the place his standing had always named. The suffering HRW documents is the design working: the man chained for eighteen hours, denied his medication, held arbitrarily, set down where the federal record said he would be persecuted — that is the wall made legible to the whole world. The body that lands in the country the record found would persecute it is not the policy’s failure; it is the policy’s report. It tells where he stood.
The United Nations experts who warn of human rights violations speak for a jurisdiction with no magistrate, no sword, and no wall. The United States has a wall, and the wall keeps its own account. The manifest did not list his medication; it listed his destination.