The Trump administration may lack a moral center, but it has shown a grim consistency when it comes to inflicting cruelty on immigrants. Its agenda goes beyond policies that are merely bad or illegal, embracing conduct that is vicious by design and relentless in execution.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement supplies the violence and terror at the beginning of the process. Once immigrants have been detained, however, the administration still has plenty of cruelty waiting for them.

One of its most disturbing practices is deporting immigrants to third countries that are not their own. Some of those destinations are countries the United States has deemed too dangerous for travel, yet the administration remains committed to sending people there.

Courts have tried to stop the practice, but the Justice Department is racing to the Supreme Court. The administration is also seeking to prevent detainees from raising concerns about whether the countries receiving them are safe.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has already delivered a brutal setback to lower courts on the issue. Last year, the justices allowed the administration to deport eight people to South Sudan despite the grave questions surrounding the move.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor captured the grotesque imbalance in her dissent. “Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche, meanwhile, acted scandalized that a court moved quickly to prevent another round of removals. His complaint ignored the administration’s repeated willingness to push forward with deportations while courts are still trying to stop it.

“Without even allowing the government ⁠a chance to respond, and in the dark of night, a federal appeals court blocked us from ⁠conducting all third-country removals of illegal aliens, an entirely legal and invaluable tool to ‌stem the tide ‌of illegal immigration,” Blanche wrote on X.

The outrage is more than a little rich. Emergency rulings in the dark of night become necessary when an administration persistently defies court orders and proceeds with deportations anyway.

This pattern has been unfolding since March 2025, when the Trump administration deported hundreds of men to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison. Those deportations occurred in direct violation of an order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg.

In the latest fight, the First Circuit Court of Appeals was forced to act because the administration was actively violating its order overturning the third country removal policy. Rather than respect the court’s ruling, the administration reached for another semantic escape hatch.

The Justice Department’s argument was that the appeals court had not yet issued a formal “mandate” to the lower court. Therefore, according to its logic, the order preventing deportations to random third countries was not yet in effect.

It was the legal equivalent of insisting that the judges had failed to say the magic word. The administration treated the absence of immediate language as permission to keep sending people away before the courts could respond.

The same garbage surfaced in the earlier dispute involving Boasberg and CECOT. There, the administration contended that Boasberg had not truly ordered officials to stop because his instruction was verbal, as though verbal court orders somehow do not count.

This is reprehensible conduct from a Justice Department determined to play word games while human beings face removal to dangerous countries. It is also constitutional crisis territory, with the administration treating judicial authority as an obstacle to evade rather than a legal command to obey.

Every part of this machinery serves the same cruel purpose. From ICE violence to secretive removals and cynical courtroom tricks, the administration keeps finding new ways to make vulnerable people suffer.

The damage will not disappear when the latest court fight ends. Undoing the shame created by this campaign of brutality will take a long time, especially while the administration continues treating cruelty as both policy and principle.