Is there any laws that say where an illegal immigrant can be deported to. For instance, could we take a group of illegal immigrants from Mexico, Canada, SE Asia, etc. and send them all to Tierra del Fuego or Chad or Easter Island.
I am assuming two things which may or may not be correct:
a) The receiving country must allow for people to be deported there.
b) The US can always deport someone back to their home country regardless of whether or not they want them back.
Assumption a) is true, and b) is not necessarily true, depending on how you are defining “home country.” It’s perfectly possible to be born and/or live your entire life in a country of which you are not a citizen and/or to which you have no right to return.
The Dept. of Homeland Security as a matter of practice will normally not attempt to deport a person to somewhere where he/she has never lived and/or has no citizenship or permanent residence rights.
Eva Luna, U.S. Immigration Paralegal
Not knowing anything about this, I can only guess that sending someone to a country that doesn’t want them is a sure way to piss off that country, wouldn’t it?
The US can single you out for abuse. There’s the case of Maher Arar. An innocent Canadian citizen with a dual Citizenship of Syria that was against his will.
The US kidnapped him on layover in New York on trip back to Canada, and shipped (“deported”) him off to Syria to be whipped and beat daily for a year till Canada managed to secure his return to his family.
Apparently the current executive branch of the US has the power, and will to ship innocent people off to be tortured.
That’s a very, very good example for why dual citizenship is not recommended by a lot of countries. Even the United States government – while recognizing it – recommends against it.
A question to add to the OP…what if your “country” of citizenship no longer exists as a political entity? (can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, tho).
You mean like Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia?
I imagine the airline would refuse to take them- generally they won’t take people who don’t have visas for wherever they are going.
If they did land, the country would deny them at immigration control and they’d be stuck in limbo until they could find a way to fly to a country that would accept them.
This would probably get some publicity and look pretty bad.
I am sure a piece of paper more or less would have made little difference in this case. He might have ended up in Guantanamo or just disappeared.
Regarding deporting someone back to their home country regardless of whether or not they want them back, how would this be achieved? Build a giant bungee launcher just outside the border and launch him flying over the border? I suppose it would work but they might have to pick him up with a handi-wipe.
In the case of the Soviet Union, it’s been a big, fat mess. At work right now I’m dealing with the case of a lady who was born in Ukraine, but lived most of her life in Latvia. Apparently she isn’t eligible for citizenship because Ukraine only granted automatic citizenship to people who were living there on the day it declared independence and/or the day its citizenship law was passed. (I ca’t say I know for sure, because the Ukrainian Consulate won’t return my repeated phone calls or faxes, but that’s what happened in another case my boss handled.)
She isn’t eligible for Latvian citizenship because she wasn’t a citizen of Latvia before the Soviet invasion (she wasn’t born yet), and her ancestors weren’t Latvian citizens. (The Latvians are more than a tad sensitive about Soviet-era attempts to control Latvian politics by resettling non-Latvians there.) She MAY be eligible for a uniquely Latvian status called non-citizen status, but the Latvian Embassy won’t discuss it in detail (loooong story). She is unlikely to be able to naturalize in Latvia even if she ends up living there again, because given her age she will probably have a hard time passing the language exam.
And let’s not even talk about the guy I met in prison who had been convicted of murder - he was born in a DP camp in Germany, but Germany doesn’t grant citizenship by birth. His parents were Soviet citizens, but he wasn’t telling from where - maybe Lithuania, maybe Ukraine, maybe Belarus, because if the Feds could determine where his parents were from, they might be able to deport hm there after he served his sentence.
The trouble is that some countries don’t allow renunciation of citizenship, or make it very, very difficult.
Darn. That is scary. I thought the movie “Terminal” was really out on a limb, but I see this is a very real scenario.
Still, my point remains. How can the US (or any country, really), deport someone to a country where that person is not wanted? Forget how the person feels, it is the other receiving government who ends up with a mess on their hands and I can’t see them liking the US for doing it.
In your first example, sending that lady to Ukraine or Latvia is almost the same as sending her to Bolivia or Iran. She is not a citizen of the country and they don’t have why to take her.
That actually depends on the country they’re going to. These days, a lot of western countries have “carrier liability” laws which means that if an airline allows someone on without whatever documents are needed, the airline will have to pay a whopping fine. But a lot of other countries still don’t have those laws and in such cases the airlines can be, and often are, more lax about it. A case that got some publicity last year was when Alex Cox (of Repo Man fame) was turned away at the airport in Moscow for flying there without realising he needed a visa to enter. Russia has no carrier liability law, and the airline didn’t care.
There have been a number of cases in Ireland of children being deported to countries they’ve never set foot in - the country of origin of their parents. So far there haven’t been any cases of the country refusing to take them, though.
That’s how we’ll handle things in the Skald regime. 'Cept it’ll be a giant slingshot manned by cyclopes purchased from Narnia for that very purpose.
What I wonder about is the basic mechanics. Does ICE just say to the person, “You have to go to such-and-such country. Go to the airport immediately and get on this plane”? Or do they escort the person? How do they chose the airline? Who pays for it?
I know that for Mexicans they just drive them to the border at Tijuana and have them walk through a gate at the border, and I guess it’s the same for Canadians. But what about a country on the other side of the planet?
But what if the receiving country DOES want to take the immigrants? Say for example we offer Lybia $500 million a year for accepting illegal immigrants and they say yes. Can a Mexican national then demand to be deported back to Mexico rather than Lybia? Can we reply, “You’re in this country illegally so you’re being shipped whereever we want to.”?
Well, that moves the bar somewhat, I expect. Sending an illegal immigrant, against their will, to a third country with which they have no connection when their home country is willing to accept them is a very different matter from normal deportation processes.
In their cases, a person might be a Yugoslavian citizen, but they would also hold subnational citizenship in Croatia or Slovenia or wherever they are most tied to. When the countries split apart, they received citizenship of the same place.
Syria being an example. I’ve heard warnings of American citizens visiting ancestrial countries only to find they inherited dual citizenship and, now that they’re back in the power of the ancestrial country, manditory military service.