Supreme Court: It's Okay to Disappear People To Third Countries With No Due Process
Executive branch is given unfettered authority to defy the law.
I don’t have the bandwidth to write about the latest travesty emanating from the Supreme Court. But I want to make sure those who don’t follow the Supreme Court’s docket are aware that the Court has now endorsed — with no analysis — deporting foreign nationals to so-called “third countries” (i.e., not the person’s country of origin) without giving them any opportunity to challenge it. This is so even if the person might face torture or certain death in that third country.
This occurred in a case, DHS v. D.V.D., in which Justice Sotomayor (joined by Justices Jackson and Kagan) wrote in dissent:
“In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach. It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an Immigration Judge found he was likely to face torture there. Then, in clear violation of a court order, it deported six more to South Sudan, a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel. An attentive District Court’s timely intervention only narrowly prevented a third set of unlawful removals to Libya. Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this Court now intervenes to grant the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied. I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.”
Her dissent goes on for another 18 pages. This is one for the history books.
Below are some links to analyses of the Court’s unsigned order by people smarter than I am. Read
’s post on his blog, , or at , or ’s piece in , or listen to and’s podcast), and weep….Weep for the end of democracy in the United States. The Court hereby hands the Executive Branch complete authority to defy the law and do whatever it wants.
As Jonathan Ryan writes:
“The United States is no longer merely flirting with authoritarianism. In D.H.S. v D.V.D., it embraced it. What SCOTUS has announced is that in this era of decay, the rules don’t matter, the Constitution doesn’t matter, and neither does the life or dignity of the person in the Government’s hands.”
And of course … first they came for the immigrants.
