At least two countries are needed to make a deportation happen: one to send deportees and one to receive them. The receiving country usually agrees to take back in its own citizens, but the Trump government develops other options.
The US has sent hundreds of deportees, most of whom seem to be Venezuelans, El Salvadorwhere they are held in one Maximum protection prison notorious for its brutality. The US sent migrants from Asia, the Middle East and Africa Panama And Costa RicaIncluding families with young children.
The Trump administration is also in Early conversations with the Rwandan government To send deportees to the Central African country, and this month the US made plans Send Laotian, Vietnamese and Filipino migrants to Libya Before you deteriorate in the face of a judicial order. (Representatives of the warring governments of Libya have since refused to make an agreement to accept deportees from the United States.)
The expansion of the third country deportation program of the administration seems to have two goals in the service of the umbrella goal to remove millions of immigrants from the United States, including both immigrants without papers and those who have the legal status, but are considered undesirable by administration.
The first seems largely tactical: it creates a process to remove migrants whose lands do not want back. Venezuela, for example, only accepts sporadic deportation flights from the United States.
The second goal, it seems, is strategic: convincing immigrants, documented or otherwise, that it is so risky to stay in the United States that they must be ‘self -reference’, so that they do not end up in a brutal prison. It is a campaign designed for deterrence.
There is another way to look at these deportations from Zoomen: by setting up deportation agreements of third countries and claiming that they are protected from judicial assessment or supervision, the administration tries to create an outsourced worldwide detention system where rights to effectively provide the process effectively does not exist by primary authoritar government.
Mr. Trump and his allies have depicted the deportation policy of the administration if necessary for national security. He has Doubt the right to the right processThis is guaranteed in the American Constitution for both citizens and non -citizens and it hinders his massive deportation campaign.
Hard treatment in third countries
Rwanda and Libya have been positioned for years as solutions for the immigration problems of richer nations.
In 2022, Rwanda agreed to take asylum seekers from Great Britain in exchange for hundreds of millions of pounds. Between 2014 and 2017 it accepted thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers from Israel. Libya has also obtained considerable help and other concessions from European countries in exchange for helping prevent migrants to reach European soil.
But those plans did not go smoothly because there is a mountain of evidence that shows that Rwanda and Libya are not safe destinations for asylum seekers or other migrants. American law prohibits deporting from people to countries where they are probably confronted with persecution or torture.
The Rwanda -Plan of Groot -Britain collapsed After a court established that it has violated international humanitarian law, which prohibits sending refugees to countries where they would be confronted with prosecution. Rwanda has a report of prosecuting political opponents at home and abroad, and its courts had rejected all asylum claims of people who were fleeing conflict zones, the court noted.
The British Court also ruled that refugees sent to Rwanda ran the risk of being deported again to other countries where their safety could not be guaranteed. The Israeli Supreme Court stopped deportations to Rwanda after reaching a similar conclusion in 2018.
Libies’ extreme abuses of migrants are also well documented. In a report from 2021, Amnesty International called the migrant detention centers of the country a “hellcape” where adult prisoners were subject to sexual violence and other forms of abuse. And in February of this year, two mass graves with at least 93 bodies of migrants were found in Libya, as a result of which the European Union freezes the financing of migration for the safety forces of the nation.
For the Trump administration, the hard treatment of prisoners can be more a function than a bug.
El Salvador has bragging in flashy videos about the humiliating and dehumanized circumstances in which the prisoners holds. Kristi Noeem, the American Minister of Interior Security, who visited the massive huge El Salvador Terrorism Opinlantingscentrumknown as Cecot, last month, made a similar point:
The legal abyss
Dual-state theory Describes a kind of authoritarianism in which a government maintains an apparently normal legal system and at the same time creates a zone where people have no real rights and can be subject to unlimited violence and coercion. Aziz Huq, professor of law at the University of Chicago, described this as a ‘legal abyss’.
The worst suffering happens to those who fall into that abyss, but it influences everyone who lives under such a system. A government that can push people into the abyss is fundamentally not limited. And the threat to be pushed into the abyss can make liberties uncertain and conditional.
In most double states, the legal abyss is run by the government itself, within its own territory. But El Salvador, a double state itself, seems to have offered his legal abyss to the United States on a contract basis, whereby deportees are locked up in Cecot, a notorious prison where people are kept in brutal circumstances, cut off all contact with the outside world and with little prospects for release.
The Trump government has argued that US courts have no jurisdiction about those deportations or the rights of the deportees sent to El Salvador.
The situation in Rwanda is less clear. If American deportees were treated in the same way as those from Israel and Great Britain, they would not be caught or held. But the decisions of Israeli and British Supreme Court show that there is reason to assume that their rights can be violated in other ways and that they would have little access to the correct process if the government would prisoners for the Trump administration.
And Libya, in particular, probably seems to be another subcertified legal abyss if it becomes a destination for American deportees. Libya is a weak and war-torn state, not double, where a government recognized by the United Nations in Tripoli rules West-Libya and another in Benghazi, led by the warlord Khalifa Haftar, controls the east.
For years, Libya has maintained a network of detention centers where migrants do not rely on the right process, and there are no functional limits for the violence to which the prisoners, including children, are subjected. Human rights groups have called the conditions ‘horrible’ and ‘regrettable’, and they are concerned that if the United States send people there, the prisoners will have no rights and no escape means.
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