Binh Thai Luc

Last week, the Obama admin­is­tra­tion announced the arrest of over 3,000 for­eign­ers who are sus­pected crim­i­nals or fugitives.

Yet what do we do with them when they have served any time asso­ci­ated with crimes they’ve com­mit­ted in the United States, and their home coun­try refuses to take them back?

A few weeks ago, five peo­ple were mur­dered in their home in San Fran­cisco, and the man sus­pected of killing them, Binh Thai Luc, was sup­posed to have been deported to Viet­nam six years ago. This isn’t an iso­lated case; in the past three years alone, nearly nine thou­sand immi­grants ordered deported to their home coun­tries due to crim­i­nal activ­ity found them­selves instead on the streets of the United States, because their home coun­tries wouldn’t take them back.

In Zad­cy­das v. Davis, et al., the Supreme court found in a 5–4 deci­sion in 2001 that a for­eign cit­i­zen in the United States can­not be impris­oned beyond the term estab­lished in sen­tenc­ing, even if a depor­ta­tion order can­not be exe­cuted due to the home country’s unwill­ing­ness to repatriate.

So what are we sup­posed to do with a for­eign national who has com­mit­ted a felony, gone to prison, served his term, and whose home coun­try won’t repa­tri­ate? Clearly, we don’t want state­less peo­ple roam­ing the streets in the United States. But the Supreme Court says we can’t lock them up indefinitely.

Do we send them on a flight to their home coun­try, and make them live in the air­port like Mehran Karimi Nasseri (whose story was heav­ily mod­i­fied into the movie The Ter­mi­nal)? Do we gather them up for The Run­ning Man?

What do we do with these people?

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