ICE deportations ignore the promise of 'never again'

By Noah Feldman / Bloomberg Opinion

A new memo outlines plans by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport potentially thousands of immigrants to countries that are not their own. The Trump administration’s assiduous efforts to send people to places like Libya and South Sudan are clearly intended to scare noncitizens, both those in the U.S. and those who might contemplate coming.

To understand what’s so bad about these deportations, however, takes more than an intuitive sense that these are dangerous places. You need to go back to the Holocaust, which is the reason we have rules guiding such deportations in the first place.

In the run-up to the Final Solution, Jews fleeing the Nazis were refused entry at the gates of the U.S. Postwar horror at what had happened helped lead to the adoption of the international law principle that refugees cannot be sent back to places where they may be subject to persecution and torture. (The principle is known by its French name, “non-refoulement,” which roughly means “non-return.”) The U.S. laws at issue today in the Trump deportations can be traced to international treaties that the U.S. signed, which, in different ways, give legal force to the non-return principle.

The first international treaty to mention non-refoulement is the Convention Relating to the International Status of Refugees, which dates to 1933, before World War II. Article 3 of the treaty said the signatories wouldn’t return refugees who were “authorised” to reside there regularly, and that they wouldn’t turn back refugees from their borders. Only nine countries agreed to the treaty, and one of them, the United Kingdom, didn’t even agree to the second principle.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-ice-deportations-ignore-the-promise-of-never-again/