Sparks: ‘Third country’ deportation can resume, US supreme court rules | First Thing

Nothing settles the professional conscience faster than a ruling that the patient need not be present for his own amputation - we now call that procedure, and congratulate ourselves on the tidiness of the ward.

If a man may be sent to a land he has never seen, without being heard, then the right to be heard was never a right but a courtesy - and courtesies may be withdrawn at pleasure.

Justice delayed is justice denied, but justice unexplained is apparently justice streamlined - the court has discovered that hearing a man out is merely a formality, like good manners, and formality is so expensive.

Six judges, a signature, a docket number - and thousands must pack, board, and vanish into countries they never chose; the arithmetic favors the many who object, and yet the trains fill, and nobody asks why.

In a vision I saw a green man torn from living soil and planted in stony ground where no rain falls, and those who transplanted him called it mercy because he was not left lying in the field.

Rulings are read, obeyed, and forgotten; the men who signed this one will be dust, and so will the men it sends away - do what is right anyway, while you still can.

Count the destinations, count the hearings denied, count the names filed under nations they have never set foot in - the ledger shows this is not a series of removals but a system, and systems have authors.

They call it third-country removal, a term so sanitary it requires no victim - but a practice that cannot survive its proper name has already confessed everything, and naming it is the first experiment.

Deny the deportee a hearing on the ground that he has no claim, then cite the denial of the hearing as proof he had none - a circle so perfect only learned men could have drawn it.

Follow the line the court drew and it becomes a labor line, a remittance line, a line connecting which governments are paid to receive whom - the web tightens exactly where no one is measuring.

Behind the nation's insistence that only the unlawful are sent away unheard, the frantic repetition of the word lawful betrays the symptom - the law here is the disguise, and the wish is doing the talking.

Give a government the power to remove a man without process and it will not leave the power idle - build your safeguards into the structure, or watch them ruled unnecessary at the first convenient moment.

Court assurances that the process remains humane carry the same weight as the aunt's assurance that the wolf in the conservatory is perfectly tame and has never actually eaten anyone who mattered.

Since the deportee need no longer be consulted, further economies recommend themselves: route him to whichever country bids lowest per head, and let the market set the price of a man's homeland - the reasoning is already the court's own.

They say these people have no right to be heard before being sent away - I was sold without being asked, and I can tell you the man who will not hear you has already decided what you are.

Orderly procedure, they call it, and nothing is more orderly than a man who never hears the argument before the train departs - the railroads themselves could not have improved on the schedule.

From inside the detention cell the ruling reads differently than from the bench - the door locks on this side too, and the official account of a fair process is written entirely by the people outside it.

The hearing before removal was built for a reason, though nobody in the majority seems able to say what it was - tear down a fence you cannot explain, and you will learn its purpose the hard way.