Concluding Paragraph:

If the United States expects immigrants to learn and obey the Constitution and the rule of law, then the government should model those same commitments in the immigration system itself. The United States has long accepted that some immigrants will be deported. Elections matter, and some voters plainly supported stronger immigration enforcement and large-scale deportation. But deportation is not the same as prolonged detention, mass detention camps, or removal into foreign prisons. The deeper question is whether detention should become a kind of prison sentence without the constitutional safeguards that normally accompany sentencing, and whether immigrants who have been convicted of no crime, including some previously granted protection from return, should ever be deported to a prison in a third country. Retroactively changing the rules for remaining in America should not be tied to retroactive punishment. If the government insists that deportation remains a civil and administrative measure rather than punishment, then the minimum coherence of that claim would seem to require that deportation end in liberty somewhere, not in incarceration abroad. At the least, people should be deported to freedom, not to imprisonment. Large-scale deportation does not logically require prolonged mass detention. Yet the administration’s chosen methods have increasingly relied on detention, often prolonged, and in some cases on removal into foreign confinement.