The Architecture of Exile
They are disappearing immigrants without trials, orders, or warning. This is exile by design. And if we don’t stop it, it becomes our future too.
“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
—Arundhati Roy
“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.”
—Octavia Butler
The face of the man from Myanmar stays with me. Hollowed cheeks, eyes drawn not just by detention, but by the kind of waiting that eats a person from the inside. He fled persecution as a member of a marginalized ethnic group, was declared a refugee, and sought safety on U.S. soil. After a criminal trial in which he was declared mentally incompetent, he was imprisoned. After serving his sentence, he was transferred to ICE who first told him that he would be sent to Libya. Next he was told it would be South Africa; and then, South Sudan. Finally, they claimed he would be returned to Myanmar.
Instead, he was transferred to Djibouti, held in a shipping container in shackles for six weeks before finally being flown to South Sudan — a country on the brink of civil war that he had never set foot in, had no legal or cultural ties to, and no means of surviving within. His whereabouts remain unknown.
There was no final removal order to South Sudan. No hearing. No fear interview. No legal avenue to contest what happened to him. What occurred wasn’t deportation. It was disappearance.
Over the past several days, multiple reports have confirmed that the MAGA regime is executing a radical shift in immigration enforcement: deporting individuals to third countries where they are not citizens and to which they have no legal, familial, or historical connection. Some of these individuals do have valid removal orders, but none were lawfully ordered removed to countries like South Sudan.
International treaties prohibit the transfer of individuals to nations where they face a substantial risk of torture, persecution, or inhumane treatment. The U.S. is a party to the Convention Against Torture and a signatory to the 1967 Protocol to the Refugee Convention. These international legal instruments obligate the U.S. to uphold the principle of non-refoulement, the cornerstone of refugee protection law, which forbids sending people to places where they may be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
Despite this, the Department of Homeland Security has begun operationalizing third-country removals with new speed and scale. A leaked ICE memo from early July outlines how agents may now carry out removals to cooperating third countries with as little as six hours' notice, even in the absence of established diplomatic assurances. The policy encourages ICE to remove individuals before legal counsel can intervene or before questions of jurisdiction can be litigated in court. The new guidance not only streamlines removals; it accelerates impunity.
South Sudan is one such receiving country. Its record of political imprisonment, disappearances, torture, and arbitrary detention is well documented by the United Nations, Amnesty International, and the U.S. State Department itself. Nonetheless, the MAGA regime has secured secret arrangements with South Sudanese authorities to receive detainees who cannot legally be returned to their countries of origin and who cannot lawfully be removed to a place that poses such clear danger.
Discussions with Rwanda have been widely reported but, to date, no public confirmation has established that any third-country removals have taken place there yet. Nigeria, meanwhile, has pushed back. According to recent reporting, officials in Abuja have refused to facilitate third-country deportations from the U.S., asserting their unwillingness to serve as an offloading point for Washington’s failed immigration enforcement goals.
This new removal scheme is not a continuation of existing deportation policy. It is a transformation. It is the resurrection of the black site logic used in the years following the invasion of Iraq when the U.S. government sent detainees to foreign intelligence services and prisons to be interrogated and held beyond the reach of U.S. courts and the Geneva Conventions. Those who were disappeared in that era have names, histories, and in many cases, graves. The same is now happening in our immigration system.
And it is not unprecedented on U.S. soil. Time and again, the tactics tested first on immigrants have been turned inward. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II began as national security theater directed at “enemy aliens,” but soon swept up tens of thousands of U.S. citizens. The COINTELPRO operations that targeted immigrant labor organizers were later used to surveil and crush civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. Even the current use of mass surveillance, border technology, and predictive policing can be traced back to immigration enforcement pilots. What begins in the shadows never stays there.
We are witnessing a legal and moral collapse, disguised in the language of sovereignty and deterrence. These are not one-off violations. They are a structure; a system engineered to make people vanish, quickly and without accountability. And if the American public allows this system to mature, it will not be reserved for immigrants alone.
The law was never meant to function like this. International refugee law, the Convention Against Torture, our own constitutional protections of due process. These are not obstacles. They are the boundaries of civilized governance. If we discard them when they are inconvenient, we discard the only tools that prevent the government from turning its most vulnerable residents into bodies for export.
We must call this what it is: exile by design, not by law. Removals without orders. Flights without destinations. Lives traded between governments to make the problem disappear. And it is happening in our name.
To be silent in the face of this is to authorize it. To pretend it cannot touch us is to forget our own history. If we do not fight for the rights of those without voice, we surrender our own rights in the process. We know this because we have seen it before.
This cannot continue. Not in our name. Not under our watch. Not in a country that still dares to call itself free.
The Firewall must hold. And we must be the ones to hold it.
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