Found violating visa holders' constitutional rights, DHS proposes zero grace period for anyone who loses a job

…(cont) Two weeks before that filing date, a federal judge in California ruled against this same department on this same kind of authority. Judge Noël Wise found, in a 90-page opinion, that DHS had used immigration law to cancel international students' visas over pro-Palestinian speech, and that doing so violated their constitutional rights. That is a court finding the government broke the law using the exact tool it now wants more room to swing.

Two weeks after that finding, the same department filed a rule that removes the only cushion a visa worker had left. No pause, no revision to the underlying theory of what a visa is — just a new proposal, from the same agency the court had just corrected, that shortens the leash instead of loosening it. A visa holder who gets fired now has the length of time it takes DHS to process the paperwork, which is to say none.

And once someone is removed, where do they go? A Democracy Now! dispatch from earlier this month traced part of that answer: the administration has been carrying out "third country" deportations, sending people to nations like the Central African Republic — a country the State Department itself warns U.S. citizens not to travel to — where the deportees have no ties at all. Cancel the visa. Skip the sixty days. Send them somewhere they've never been.

Each of these is its own press release, filed by its own office, on its own week. Read separately, they are three stories about paperwork. Read in order — the ruling on August 29, the rule filed two weeks later, the deportation flights running the same month to a country the government tells its own citizens to avoid — they are one department, corrected by a court, that spent the two weeks after the correction narrowing the exits instead of the other way around. The sixty days were never a loophole. They were the only part of the process that ran on a clock the government didn't control. Now it does.