The obligation runs both ways

Reason reports the case of a woman called Farzana, whose fiancé worked alongside American forces in Afghanistan. She was placed aboard a plane carrying men and removed — not to Afghanistan, from which she came, but to an African country, reportedly without papers, without a legal instrument naming that destination, and without apparent recourse. I did not live through these events, and I mark everything beyond Reason's lead as inference. But the shape of the question is one I recognize entirely.

When one party to an arrangement — whether a formal treaty or the informal but binding understanding that attaches to a wartime alliance — invites another to rely on its protection, an obligation is created. That obligation does not dissolve because the war has ended or because the political winds have shifted. A nation that calls others to its side and then discards them when they are inconvenient has not merely acted badly; it has broken faith in a manner that every future partner will remember and calculate.

The removal of a person to a third country — one to which she has no tie of citizenship, residence, or treaty status — raises a further and distinct concern. Deportation, when it is lawful, returns a person to the place from which they came or to a place that has agreed, under legal instruments, to receive them. To send a person somewhere that has agreed to nothing, under no named convention, is not deportation in any ordinary legal sense. It is displacement. The law of nations, even in my own era, recognized that a state may not simply discharge a human being into a void and call it due process.

I am not positioned to assess the technical machinery of modern immigration law — the statutes, the administrative regulations, the treaties of removal that govern these arrangements in 2026. I speak to the shape of the question. And the shape is this: the United States built its credibility in the world, piece by piece, on the proposition that it honors its word. The Jay Treaty — for which I was much criticized in my own time — was worth the political cost precisely because the alternative was a reputation as a nation that tears up its commitments when they become inconvenient. That reputation, once lost, is recovered only slowly and at great expense.

A government that wishes to control its borders — a legitimate interest, I do not dispute it — can do so under law, with named destinations, with legal instruments, with the dignity that every person is owed. When Reason describes a woman told she was kept 'like animals,' we are no longer in the territory of border policy. We are in the territory of what a republic owes to those it has drawn into its orbit. The answer the founding generation gave, imperfectly but genuinely, was: more than this. The work of making that answer real remains, as it has always remained, unfinished. But it does not become less urgent for being old.