Trump's Immigrant Removals Aren't Technically Deportations. So What Are They?

Reporters and advocacy groups found it hard to catalogue the Trump administration’s chaotic and secretive mass deportation program when it launched this winter, beginning with what word best describes the unprecedented tactics.

Deportation is the most commonly understood term, but it refers to a codified judicial process for expelling an alien back to their home country for violating immigration law—a process that the Trump administration’s program barely resembled. In the multiple cases of foreign students who were snatched off the street and had their visas revoked, they were given no due process and provided no evidence of what, if any, laws they had violated.

The Trump administration also summarily expelled several hundred alleged Venezuelan gang members and sent them not to their home country but to a nightmarish Salvadoran megaprison. The only word we have that comes close to describing that, courtesy of the war on terror, is to rendition someone.

At the same time, the administration terminated temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of refugees from countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. There were also reports that the White House was considering revoking legal status for Ukrainians who had fled their war-torn country.

There is a term for that last one: refoulement—the act of returning a refugee or asylum seeker back to the country from which they fled, and where they face serious risk of harm. The principle of non-refoulement is a cornerstone of international refugee law.

Refoulement is also a broad enough term to cover the Trump administration’s exotic anti-immigrant tactics. Refoulement comes from the French verb refouler, which means “to force back” or “to cause to flow back,” originally used to describe the backflow of bodies of water.

As Wall Street Journal columnist Ben Zimmer explains, 19th and 20th century writers began applying the word to the French colonialists’ strategy of driving native populations out of an area to make way for white settlers.

Refoulement gained its current definition in the 1951 Refugee Convention, a major United Nations multilateral treaty. Refugee
rights became an international concern following World War II, specifically due to several incidents where countries refused asylum to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.

When it came time to set down the rights of refugees, the convention adopted refouler and refoulement at the suggestion
of French and Belgian representatives. The words were loose enough to cover acts against refugees, such as turning them away at the border, while avoiding the judicial and territorial connotations of deportation or expulsion.

Refoulement is, in fact, exactly what the White House brags it is doing: turning back an “invasion” of immigrants through every tool—legal and extralegal—at its disposal.

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