No, I'm in favour of rehabilitation and setting people up for success, and also not deporting people who have undergone a rehabilitation process.
If we are going to incarcerate people under the current system (which doesn't serve to rehabilitate, and thus only serves to remove people from the general public who may be a danger to said public), then I think we shouldn't bother for people who are going to get deported anyway, though I think those people should still receive a trial by jury before deportation.
I think incarceration only has limited effectiveness as a deterrent, and the cost to society of incarcerating people who are going to be deported after outweighs any benefit in deterrence from doing so.
To be clear, I think the cost of incarceration in the current system outweighs the benefit more generally, so I'd strongly favour overall prison reform and an end of for-profit prisons. But people being deported will incur additional costs, and deportation itself serves as a deterrent already.
If someone can't be rehabilitated, they should be contained[0]
| If they need to be contained, we have additional concerns with deportation.
| | If they are being deported freely to another country (i.e. not through extradition), then we are doing (at least) similar harm to another as to what harm would be if we just let them go in our own country. Personal ethics aside, this creates disorder and enemies. It is one thing if extradition is attempted and this is the result after failure, but it is another if the process doesn't happen. This is analogous to capturing all the rattlesnakes in my backyard and throwing them into yours. "Not my problem" isn't so accurate when I piss you off and now I have a new problem which is you being pissed at me and seeking your own form of justice. In the short term, being an asshole is an optimal strategy, but in the long term is really is not.
| | If they are being extradited to another country and that country is known to torture or do things that we do not believe are humane to their inmates, then I similarly agree we should not extradite and it is better to contain here. The blood is still on your hands, as they say.
Extradition (distinct from deportation) is the right move when it is believed the criminal will face the rule of law, fairly and in accordance to our own ethics (how we would treat our own).
I see no situation in which extra-judicial deportation (or extradition!) is the right course of action. It is also critical to recognize that mistakes happen. Even if cumbersome, the judicial process reduces the chance for mistakes. It's also worth noting that, by design, the judicial system is biased such that when mistakes occur there is a strong preference that a criminal is left unpunished rather than an innocent be prosecuted (an either or situation). We want to maximize justice, I doubt there is many who do not. But when it comes down to it, there is a binary decision at the end of the day "guilty or not guilty." We engineer failure into the judicial system just like we do in engineering. You do not design a building to fail, but you do design a building such that when it does fail, it is most likely to fail in a predictable manner which causes the least harm. And if you don't want to take my word on it, you can go consult Blackstone, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and many others. Because at the end of the day, I'm not the one who created this system, but I do agree with their reasoning.
[0] Not killed, because if we are wrong about the inability the rehabilitate then the cost is higher than the cost of custodianship.
"I see no situation in which extra-judicial deportation (or extradition!) is the right course of action."
I see one: where the country in which the crime was committed (the "deporting country") considers spending resources to prosecute the offender, indulging him with a court process (including trial and appeal), and then housing and feeding him during his sentence (if he is jailed) not in its public interest.
I say "indulging" because due process is expensive. Why should the deporting country be obliged to spend their taxpayers' resources on this foreign national? Not because deporting their national back to their home country would create "disorder and enemies" due to the harm that such "rattlesnakes" would do in its territory, since (1) that home country would likely welcome the discretion to decide how to deal with its national committing crimes in its territory, (2) it is not likely that the home country would protest that its national was not sufficiently punished by the legal system of another country unaccountable to it and outside its jurisdiction, and (3) in some circumstances the home country can still exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction over its national for the crime he committed overseas. The prosecutorial discretion of the deporting country should not be fettered by the home country.
How do you know that the person is even a foreign national? Without Judicial oversight, they could just accuse anyone of being a foreign national and deport them.
This is exactly how disappear people, and start a reign of terror.
Undocumented immigrants are taxpayers.