A new memo outlines plans by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport potentially thousands of immigrants to countries that are not their own.
To understand what’s so bad about these deportations, you need to go back to the Holocaust, which is the reason we have rules guiding such deportations in the first place.
In the run-up to the Final Solution, Jews fleeing the Nazis were refused entry at the gates of the U.S. Postwar horror at what had happened helped lead to the adoption of the international law principle that refugees cannot be sent back to places where they may be subject to persecution and torture. (The principle is known by its French name, “non-refoulement,” which roughly means “non-return.”)
The first international treaty to mention non-refoulement is the Convention Relating to the International Status of Refugees, which dates to 1933, before World War II. Article 3 of the treaty said the signatories wouldn’t return refugees who were “authorised” to reside there regularly, and that they wouldn’t turn back refugees from their borders. Only nine countries agreed to the treaty, and one of them, the UK, didn’t even agree to the second principle.
That set the stage for the Holocaust. Famously, the German liner St. Louis, a passenger ship containing some 900 Jews fleeing the Nazis, was turned away by both Cuba and the U.S. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where the refugees were spread among the governments of the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Nearly all of those who went to the UK survived. Most of the others were caught up in the German invasion of the rest of Europe; 254 of them died in the Holocaust.