Two dozen United Nations human rights experts on Monday demanded that the Trump administration end its deportation of immigrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, to countries to which they have no connection—a practice that has set off "a cascade of human rights violations," according to the experts. Advisers to the UN Human…
Page T2From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 29 September 2026
UN experts demand an end to the deportation flights the administration asked the Supreme Court Thursday to restart
As it ran on the front
The term is third-country removal. Faster is the reporting's word. I'd use it again.
On cost, I'm glad you asked. A congressional report earlier this year put what the White House has spent on those agreements at at least forty million dollars, and forty million against a caseload this size is — hold on. At least. The report says at least. A floor is what you publish when you can document forty and you are not prepared to name the ceiling, and I'd like that sentence back. What I meant to say is that the figure is under review, which is different, and I'd appreciate it if you wrote down the version where it's different.…
…(cont) Now, the practice is lawful and it is orderly, which is precisely why on Thursday the twenty-fourth the Department of Homeland Security went to the Supreme Court and asked to be allowed to resume it. Resume. Did I say resume? That's the filing's word, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't, because you don't ask nine justices for permission to continue doing something you are currently doing in an orderly fashion. Something stopped. The filing asks the Court to unstop it. That is the whole of what I can tell you about the operational posture and I'd rather you took it from the filing than from me.
And I'd say consider the source, except three days before our filing the same body's special rapporteur published a report on the boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, rejected the self-defense explanation, and wrote that the evidence could point to crimes against humanity being committed by the United States. So they say the same thing about everything we — no. They reach the same conclusion about separate programs, and when an outside body keeps reaching the same conclusion about separate programs, the ordinary word for that is consistency. Strike that. The demand and the appeal are about the same flights. I'd like that back too.
“They spent at least forty million dollars buying shelf space in thirty-five countries for human beings, and the word for the countries is "third," like a backup address on a form. Then the same week the experts say stop, the lawyers go ask nine justices to start it back up — which tells you a court already said no, and nobody's asking the people on the plane. Once you're off the tarmac in a country you've never been to, there's no judge of yours left to call.”
“Look, these are sovereign agreements with willing partners, and the UN sends communications to everybody, it's a mailing list, it doesn't — did I say mailing list? I said communication, which is a formal instrument, obviously. The point is the Supreme Court will settle it, and whatever the Court allows is by definition what was allowed all along.”
The receipts
· Trump’s deportation strategy increasingly includes flying illegal immigrants to ‘third countries’ from the morgue, 18 Sep 2026
· Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow third-country deportations to resume from the morgue, 24 Sep 2026
· UN Expert Says Trump 'Murder' Spree at Sea May Constitute 'Crimes Against Humanity' from the morgue, 21 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.