If you read one page of this project, read this one. It sets out a single distinction, and everything else is evidence for it.
The removal is one thing. What is added to it is another.
When a court reviews a death sentence and stays the execution because the method of carrying it out would be cruel, it does not disturb the sentence. The two questions are separate. The sentence may stand while the method fails.
The Coalition takes the view that the same separation applies here, and says so in its own voice. A removal order may be lawful. The way it is executed is a different question, and so is what the executing state has arranged to happen at the other end.
This is the Coalition’s framing. What follows is not.
Why it is hard to see
The two kinds of removal look identical from the outside. They are carried out under the same statutory authority, on the same paperwork, by the same officers, often on the same aircraft. A person served with a notice naming a country cannot tell from that notice which one is about to happen to them, and neither can their family, and often neither can their lawyer until it is too late to do anything about it.
The Coalition’s view is that this is not incidental. The lawful category is the cover under which the punitive practice moves. Every court in the record below had to be shown, case by case and country by country, what was actually happening at the other end before it could tell the difference. That is the whole difficulty, and it is the reason this project exists.
What the Coalition says this is
The Coalition’s position, stated in its own voice and not attributed to any court, is that this is not a series of unfortunate administrative episodes. It is a method. Its effect, and the Coalition believes its purpose, is to place people beyond the reach of due process before they can invoke it.
The method has recognisable parts, and each of the following is documented in a filed court record:
- People are taken with little or no notice, in the middle of the night.
- They are shackled, and in some cases put in straitjackets for as long as sixteen hours.
- They are not permitted to contact their families or their lawyers.
- They are put aboard military aircraft.
- They are not told where they are going until they are in the air.
- They land in states they have no connection to and, in several cases, had never heard named in their own proceedings.
- They are held on arrival, in some cases incommunicado, in one state in solitary confinement.
- Under the policy in force, where the Department of State credits a diplomatic assurance, a person may be removed with no notice and no procedure at all.
The nearest a court has come to naming this as a design is a federal judge’s finding that the government’s actions “appear to be part of a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly,” in a case she said was “not an outlier.” She made that observation while refusing relief for want of jurisdiction, and this site records it as an observation rather than a finding.
Four courts asked to find that the practice is punitive have declined to do so on the records before them, and the Coalition records those refusals in full in section five. It says what it believes, and it shows the reader everything that cuts against it.
Who this is being done to
A great many of the people in these cases hold protection ordered by a United States immigration judge. Not a claim of protection. An order.
The five people flown to Ghana had all been granted withholding of removal or deferral of removal under the Convention against Torture, meaning a judge had found each of them more likely than not to face persecution, torture or death if returned home. One of them had fled after being tortured by the military and police, who told him that if they ever saw him again they would kill him. Of the individual cases in the register, the man removed towards Nicaragua held deferral under the Convention. The Egyptian law student who had been tortured as a political prisoner held withholding. A second Egyptian man held a finding that he would more likely than not be tortured. The Russian man held withholding, and the judge who granted it recorded that but for a presumption she was required to apply, she would have granted him asylum outright. The Venezuelan man held withholding under the Convention.
These are the people being moved to third countries. The protection order does not stop a removal elsewhere, and the Coalition does not say otherwise. But it is the reason the destination matters more here than in any ordinary removal, because the whole purpose of that order was to keep the person away from a place where they would be harmed.
Many had also been living under immigration supervision for a very long time. One man had been on an order of supervision since 2009. Another had been released by a federal court in 2000 and lived under supervision for a quarter of a century. They reported when required. Then, in 2025, they were re-detained. Of the reason given for one of those re-detentions, the judge wrote that it was “incomprehensible” that immigration authorities would decide, six years after the man’s most recent conviction, that he had suddenly become a threat to public safety. The second justification offered, that he could be removed quickly, the judge called “implausible,” because seven months later no travel document request had been sent.
What changed in 2025 was not these people. It was what was decided to do with them.
The rule is a hundred and thirty years old
In 1896 the Supreme Court held that Congress may expel a person, and may detain them while it does so, but may not add punishment to the expulsion without a criminal trial. It called the added punishment “infamous,” and it distinguished it from “detention or temporary confinement” incidental to removal. That case, Wong Wing v. United States, has never been overruled. The Supreme Court restated it in 2001 in Zadvydas v. Davis, which recorded that Wong Wing had held “that punitive measures could not be imposed upon [noncitizens] ordered removed because ‘all persons within the territory of the United States are entitled to the protection’ of the Constitution.”
What a reader should take from this project
Not that removal is unlawful. It usually is not. The point is narrower and harder to answer: that a lawful order can be carried out in a way the Constitution does not permit, that this has been happening, and that when courts have been shown the evidence for a particular destination they have stopped it.
Sources for this page
Wong Wing v. United States, 163 U.S. 228 (1896); Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, 693–94 (2001); D.A. v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-03135-TSC (D.D.C. 15 September 2025); Van Nguyen v. Bondi, 818 F. Supp. 3d 1235 (W.D. Wash. 2026); Elshourbagy v. Bondi, 817 F. Supp. 3d 1102 (W.D. Wash. 2025); Vashchuk v. Bondi, 826 F. Supp. 3d 1282 (W.D. Wash. 2026); Saadhom v. Bondi, 829 F. Supp. 3d 907 (W.D. Wash. 2026); Baltodano v. Bondi, 815 F. Supp. 3d 1191 (W.D. Wash. 2025); Rea-Hernandez v. Bondi, 824 F. Supp. 3d 1124 (W.D. Wash. 2026). All in the register of court decisions.