Trump’s lawyers claim they’ve found a loophole that will allow Trump to ship immigrants overseas to be tortured.
Federal law states that the United States shall not “expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” This law implements a treaty, known as the Convention Against Torture, which the United States ratified more than three decades ago.
Federal regulations, moreover, provide that even after an immigration judge has determined that a noncitizen may be deported to another country, that judge’s order “shall not be executed in circumstances that would violate Article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.” And those regulations also establish a process that immigrants can use to raise concerns with an immigration judge that they may be tortured if sent to a specific country.
The Trump administration, however, claims it has discovered a loophole that renders all of these legal protections worthless, and is now asking the Supreme Court to explicitly give it the authority to make use of that loophole in order to enact its immigration policies.
Just to add to your point of the size of the US, I recently traveled from San Bernardino California to Salmon Idaho in my 2001 Toyota Tacoma. Even avoiding high traffic areas like Utah it was still rough, that’s with it being a more or less straight line through Nevada, only 20 fucking hours.
Honestly I suspect that this will be both a boon and a curse for resistance as time goes on, since it does heavily restrict how fast you can physically move people around. This means any response time by the feds is going to be decently lagged out.
I am also annoyed that those exact thoughts about boon/curse had to enter my brain, but storing it in long-term planning just the same.
Hey at least its broadly to our advantage, between the Routes, Highways, Biways, and Interstates there’s basically no way to lock down a county let alone a state without immediately overextending your manpower massively. This ain’t the Soviets in WW2 where the Germans could just knock and the railway and isolate a city.