Die schmutzige Geschichte der Offshoring -Migranten: Trump ist nur die neueste, die eine kostspielige und unmoralische Taktik annimmt

[SS from the essay by David Scott Fitzgerald, Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego.]

Trump’s approach to offshore detention, however, is unprecedented. His administration has sent hundreds of immigrants who were living in the United States, some of them for years, to third countries where there is no practical way to judge their asylum claims. Moreover, immigrants have been removed from the United States before they have had a chance to defend themselves before an immigration judge, as is standard practice in the United States. “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” a U.S. appellate court wrote in April, in a decision demanding that the [Trump administration](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/topics/trump-administration) return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was wrongly sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, to the United States.

But on June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily allowed the Trump administration to continue deporting immigrants to third countries, including to South Sudan. The summary ruling, in which no reasoning was offered, paused a lower court’s order halting such deportations and affirming immigrants’ rights to know where they are being deported to and to challenge being sent to a country where they could face persecution or torture.

Although this offshoring practice sends a strong signal that the government is taking a hard line on immigration, it is bad policy: it is far more expensive than detaining and processing asylum seekers on the mainland, offers too many concessions to host countries that often have poor human rights records, and is used to skirt the human rights obligations to which the United States has agreed. It also portends a broader threat to the rule of law domestically; normalizing offshore detention can normalize the mistreatment of U.S. citizens. “Homegrown criminals next,” Trump told Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, during a televised meeting in the Oval Office in April.