Jonathan P. Baird

Back when I was in law school, I took a course on international human rights and learned a word I never heard before. That word was refoulement. It is not a word you ever hear.

Refoulement is the act of deporting a refugee or an asylum seeker to places where their life or freedom are threatened. Non-refoulement is a principle under international human rights law. The idea is that no one should be sent to a country where they might face torture, cruel inhuman or degrading treatment, or other harm.

Since the beginning of the Trump second term, the U.S. government has blatantly disregarded the principle of non-refoulement, maximizing harm to those caught in its grip. Since January 2025, 23,000 people, a staggering number, have been sent to 26 countries. These are people being sent to countries where they have no citizenship, no family ties and often no common language.

The people deported have no legal status, often no identity documents and no way to provide for their basic needs. No effort has been made to insure their personal safety in the new location where they have been transported. The Trump regime has been holding people in detention for months and then deporting them with little or no notice and without a meaningful chance to contest the deportation.

Refugees and asylum seekers have legal cases to present but they are not given the opportunity to make their case. Instead, they are fast-tracked out of the United States to places unknown and unchosen. These places can be and often are horrendously dangerous like CECOT prison in El Salvador where people face indefinite imprisonment and torture at the hands of vicious guards.

Third country removals are taking cruelty to the next level. They leave those victimized in a state of legal limbo, statelessness and precarity. They make a mockery of any notion of due process. The best that deported people might hope for is to get back to their original country which they had previously tried to escape.

These deportations represent a moral and legal collapse of our justice system into fascism. In the past, refugees and asylum seekers at least had a chance to get before a judge. Now, if there is any legal process at all, it is a rubber stamp ruling with a preordained result dictated by Stephen Miller. I would submit that one difference between democracy and fascism is that democracy maintains a legitimate judiciary. That disappears under fascism where assembly line injustice is the norm.

The principle of non-refoulement is explicitly included in the Convention Against Torture as well as the 1951 Refugee Convention and an accompanying 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. The U.S. is a party to the Convention Against Torture. While it is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it did accede to the 1967 Protocol. Such treaties are considered the supreme law of the land under our Constitution but they are also treated as non-self-executing treaties. Enforcement relies on U.S. federal acts passed by Congress. Such laws exist for both Conventions.

The U.S. government has made agreements with 35 countries to take those deported. The receiving countries get cash in return. It is like the government is dangling large amounts of money in front of many of the most corrupt countries on earth to gain participation inn their Faustian scheme. For the victims, the third country deportations exist as a scare tactic to promote self-deportation.

The New York Times has reported on some of the stories of those deported to third countries. Leonardo Tellez-Sanchez, a deportee from Venezuala, was deported to Liberia. He had lived in Dallas for five years after a judge granted an order protecting him from being sent to Venezuela. He worked at a car dealership and he was looking forward to the birth of his son. On a routine visit to renew his work permit, ICE arrested him.

Tellez-Sanchez got a lawyer and tried to make a legal challenge to what had happened to him. ICE held him for 8 months, moving his location more than 6 times before he was deported to Liberia. About his deportation to Africa, Tellez-Sanchez said:

“They didn’t treat us like people, like human beings. They can say or do anything to you and there’s nothing you can do.”

In August, the Times reported on the deportation of a 24 year old Afghan man whose father, brother and sister had worked alongside U.S. forces during the 20 year long war. This broke a longstanding commitment previously made to protect wartime allies. The Afghan man, Khalil, (no last name at the request of his lawyer) left Kabul with his family in August 2021 when the country fell to the Taliban. The family fled to Pakistan but they again had to leave when the Taliban raided their home, seeking them. One of Khalil’s brothers had been killed fighting the Taliban in 2020.

Khalil traveled to the U.S. and got detained crossing the border. He applied for asylum. He had been granted withholding of removal last year by an immigration judge who found his fear of persecution credible. The government deported Khalil to the Central African Republic, a country the State Department advises people not to travel to. Khalil never got a real day in court.

Deportations like this are allowed to happen because of a shadow docket decision issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2025. In a stinging dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the majority ignored law that required due process. The majority have never explained their rationale.

During the George W. Bush years, we heard about black sites where the government disappeared suspected terrorists to secret locations outside the U.S. to be tortured. The Trump regime has created a black site variant. They take immigrants with valid unresolved legal claims to places where they have outsourced the cruelty. Imagine being in an entirely unfamiliar country where you know no one, cannot speak the language and you have no way to support yourself. Whether or not you face torture, you have been placed in an untenable situation with no way to make a living and no future.

If fascism is defeated in the United States and our legal system is rehabilitated, the architects of third country deportations deserve trials and punishment for their crimes against humanity.