Court warns of internment; administration asks to detain anyway, won't rule out doing it at the ballot box.

…(cont) Three weeks later, on October 1, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case. Not to decide whether the policy should be dismantled — to decide whether immigrants challenging deportation have a right to a hearing at all before they can be held indefinitely. The administration didn't appeal the internment comparison by backing off the practice. It went to the highest court in the country and asked the justices to bless the thing a federal appeals court just finished comparing to the camps.

Then came October 2. A reporter's question was simple: will the president rule out sending ICE to polling sites. He didn't rule it out. Not "no." Not "we'd never." Just silence where the denial should go.

Line those three dates up and the sequence reads itself. A court says this policy rhymes with one of the uglier chapters in the country's history. The policy's authors respond by asking for more legal room to run it, not less. And in the same stretch of days, the agency empowered to detain people without a hearing is not promised to stay away from the place where people stand in line to vote.

The Supreme Court hasn't ruled yet. That's the whole point of this moment — it hasn't ruled, and until it does, the policy stands exactly as it stood when a federal judge reached for internment to describe it. Nothing in the record says ICE won't be at your polling place in November. Nothing in the record says it will be, either. That's not a comfort. That's a gap the government gets to fill on its own schedule, with agents who already don't need to give the people they hold a hearing.