Sparks: US Supreme Court lifts restrictions on third-country deportations

Judges who sign the order, ministers who file the paperwork, the crowds who cheer - all of it dust already, and the deported man is the only one in the courtroom doing anything that will outlast the season.

If a man may be sent to a land not his own without notice of where or why, then notice is not a courtesy he is denied but a right he never had, and we should say so plainly.

The court, which was built to weigh, which was built to hear, which was built to stay the hand until the facts were known, has lifted the hand before asking where it falls - how long will procedure be called patience?

A mechanism that removes the notice requirement removes the only check that made the wrong country's name discoverable before the plane left, and systems built on speed alone will process the innocent with the same admirable efficiency.

As water forced through a narrow channel carries whatever it touches without asking what it carries, so a deportation routed through a third country carries the person past every valve that once let him be examined.

The announcement concerns a legal docket; what it concerns is the man told of his destination after the wheels left the ground, with no morning in which to show the paper proving the third country would kill him.

We are told the policy was chosen; better to observe that every safeguard was shaved away one unremarkable ruling at a time, and what survived each shaving was simply whatever fit the conditions of the moment.

There is a gate across this road called notice of destination, and the men tearing it down cannot tell me who built it or why, which is precisely the ignorance that makes their confidence so alarming.

A nation that declares all men endowed with the right to be heard, then removes the hearing from the man about to be sent to a country not his own, has told you which men it counts.

Cold does not care which flag the plane lands under, and hunger reads no notice of destination; the man in the third-country cell feels exactly what any man feels when the state ships him like freight.

Take away the notice and you take away the map; a person who cannot learn the destination before departure cannot plan a single step, so the work moves to whoever is still willing to pass word along.

They call it a temporary lifting of safeguards, but a right suspended while the court considers it is a right the court has already measured and found lighter than the state's convenience.