Federal law states that the United States shall not “expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” This law implements a treaty, known as the Convention Against Torture, which the United States ratified more than three decades ago.

Federal regulations, moreover, provide that even after an immigration judge has determined that a noncitizen may be deported to another country, that judge’s order “shall not be executed in circumstances that would violate Article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.” And those regulations also establish a process that immigrants can use to raise concerns with an immigration judge that they may be tortured if sent to a specific country.

The Trump administration, however, claims it has discovered a loophole that renders all of these legal protections worthless, and is now asking the Supreme Court to explicitly give it the authority to make use of that loophole in order to enact its immigration policies.

According to President Donald Trump’s lawyers, the administration can simply wait until after an immigration judge has conducted the proceeding that ordinarily would determine whether a particular noncitizen may be deported to a particular country, and then, if that noncitizen is allowed to be deported, announce that the immigrant will be deported to some previously unmentioned country — even if that immigrant reasonably fears they will be tortured in that nation.

Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., the case where the Trump administration asks the justices to neutralize the Convention Against Torture, is unlike some of the more high-profile deportation cases that reached the Supreme Court — such as the unlawful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador — in that no one really questions that the immigrants at the heart of this case may be deported somewhere.

D.V.D. involves immigrants who have gone through the ordinary process to determine whether they can be removed from the country. The Trump administration even claims that some of them were convicted of very serious crimes. According to the administration, “all were adjudicated removable.”

But the Convention Against Torture and the federal law implementing it forbid the government from deporting anyone to a country where there is good reason to believe they will be tortured. And federal immigration law and regulations lay out the process that should be used to determine if an immigrant may be deported to a particular country.

How immigration hearings are supposed to work

As the district judge who heard this case explained in his opinion ruling that Trump must comply with the Convention Against Torture, when the government wishes to deport a noncitizen, that individual is typically entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge. That hearing determines “not only whether an individual may be removed from the United States but also to where he may be removed.”

In these proceedings, the immigrant is given an opportunity to name where they want to be deported to, if the immigration judge determines that they should be removed. If the immigrant does not do so, or if the United States cannot deport them to their designated country, federal law lays out where they may be sent. The United States may deport someone to a country where they have no ties only as a last resort, and only if that nation’s government “will accept the alien into that country.”

The immigration judge will generally inform the noncitizen which nations they could potentially be sent to, giving that noncitizen an opportunity to raise any concerns that they may be tortured if sent to a particular country. The immigration judge will then decide whether those concerns are sufficiently serious to prohibit the United States from sending the immigrant to that particular country.

The D.V.D. case concerns noncitizens who have been through this process. In many cases, an immigration judge determined that they could not be deported to a particular country. According to the immigrants’ lawyers, for example, one of their clients is a Honduran woman. An immigration judge determined that she cannot be sent back to Honduras because her husband “severely beat her and the children after his release from prison” and she fears that he would find her and abuse her again.

And that brings us to the loophole that Trump’s lawyers claim he can exploit to bypass the Convention Against Torture.

Ordinarily, if the government wants to deport someone to a country that did not come up during their hearing before an immigration judge, it can reopen the process. The government will inform the immigrant where it wishes to deport them. The immigrant will again have the opportunity to object if they fear being tortured, and an immigration officer and, eventually, an immigration judge, will determine if this fear is credible.

But the Trump administration claims it can bypass this process. If a country “has provided diplomatic assurances that aliens removed from the United States will not be persecuted or tortured,” the Trump administration claims it can deport people to that country “without the need for further procedures.” In other cases, it claims that it can give the immigrant such a brief period of time to raise an objection that it would be exceedingly difficult for them to find legal counsel, much less compile enough evidence to show that their fears are justified.

Using this virtually nonexistent process, the Trump administration recently tried to deport several non-Sudanese immigrants to South Sudan, a nation that was recently in a civil war. The peace in South Sudan, moreover, appears to be collapsing.

So Trump’s lawyers claim that the government can wait until after a noncitizen has received a hearing before an immigration judge, and only then reveal where it intends to send that noncitizen — even if that country is one of the most dangerous locations on Earth. And the immigrant may receive no process whatsoever after they learn about this decision.

Can Trump actually deny due process to people who might be tortured?

Recently, in A.A.R.P. v. Trump (2025), the Supreme Court ruled that a different group of immigrants that Trump hoped to deport without due process “must receive notice…that they are subject to removal…within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek” relief from a federal court. The district judge that heard the D.V.D. case determined that a similar rule should apply to noncitizens the Trump administration wants to deport to a surprise third country.

The Trump administration, however, primarily argues that three provisions of federal law governing which courts are allowed to hear immigration disputes mean that the district judge lacked jurisdiction to hear the D.V.D. case in the first place.

One of these provisions generally forbids federal courts from second-guessing the government’s decision to bring a removal proceeding against a particular immigrant. It also typically prohibits judges from intervening in the government’s decision to execute an existing removal order once that order has been handed down by an immigration judge. But, as the district judge explained, the D.V.D. plaintiffs do not challenge the government’s ”discretionary decisions to execute their removal orders.” Nor do they “challenge their removability.” They merely challenge the government’s decision to bypass the ordinary process it must use to obtain an order permitting an immigrant to be deported to a specific country.

The other two provisions, meanwhile, largely govern the appeals process that immigrants may use if they lose a case before an immigration judge. Such cases are typically appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and then to a federal circuit court, not the district court that heard the D.V.D. case. But, again, the D.V.D. plaintiffs do not seek to appeal an immigration judge’s decision. They object to the Trump administration’s refusal to bring them before an immigration judge in the first place.

Trump’s lawyers, moreover, are quite candid about what it means if the Supreme Court accepts these jurisdictional arguments. “To the extent an action does not fit” within their proposed process, they argue, “the result is that judicial review is not available.” So, if Trump prevails, many of the immigrants he hopes to target will not have any recourse in any court.

Many immigrants, in other words, could be deported without any judge or other neutral adjudicator considering whether the immigrant will be tortured in the country the Trump administration wants to send them to — both circumventing the Convention Against Torture and giving the administration a cruel new weapon in its immigration crackdown.

What does a contrarian, grievance-happy comedian do when contrarianism and grievance become the norm? Bill Burr, long the poster child for a type of angry white male misanthrope, may be the last person you’d expect to embrace empathy in response to, well, everything — but that seems to be the case.

Burr recently told NPR’s Terry Gross that “there’s also a part of me that really hates the fact that I have been so angry.” His new Hulu comedy special, Bill Burr: Drop Dead Years, leans all the way into that remorse, with jokes that — for the most part — sidestep giving into anger and remonstrance in favor of self-reflection. It’s a far cry from his old persona, which often reveled in jokes about lesbians, fat people, trans athletes, and other marginalized groups who seemed to draw his ire.

Burr discusses things that he previously would likely have been the first to ridicule: his experiences with therapy, learning how to be a kinder partner, and the real effects of toxic masculinity on men. He even opens up briefly about experiencing intense depression and childhood sexual abuse. It’s pretty weighty stuff, treated with surprising and studious care.

Alongside the special, he’s also making headlines for taking aim at billionaires, defending Luigi Mangione, getting into fights with conservative commentators, and roasting Elon Musk for doing a Nazi salute — a move that he claims got him flagged by the Musk-owned X. It’s leading some conservatives to ask, is Burr actually “going woke?”

Well, no, not exactly. But there is something new to the way Burr is positioning himself as a man in 2025 America. “He is giving voice to a feeling that the rules or acceptable strategies for climbing the masculinity ladder feel opaque, contradictory, and changing,” Northwestern sociologist Rebecca Ewert told Vox, referring to the status hierarchies men have to navigate in a patriarchal society. “There have been rules — they have never been consistent. Black men need different strategies than white men. There are different ways of proving dominance in a weightlifting gym than on the floor of Congress. Burr is explaining that they feel more contradictory than ever.”

As a 56-year-old white guy, Burr embodies the much-discussed masculinity crisis — yet while griping about his losses, he’s also noticing that even his advantages can be shortcomings in disguise. “He’s articulating ways the system doesn’t serve him,” Ewert said, “but he’s also so afraid to lose that system he’s been seeing his whole life. And we’re seeing that throughout the culture.”

You might think that anxiety over his perceived loss of status would produce even angrier comedy. Yet counter to prevailing cultural narratives about angry white men getting older and more cantankerous, Burr seems to feel liberated by aging. He’s happy to be getting along better with his wife, relieved to finally be able to say out loud that he’s sad.

“Men aren’t allowed to be sad,” he says, in a self-deprecating moment describing how he opened up to his wife about experiencing emotion. “We’re allowed to be one of two things. We’re allowed to be mad or fine.” It’s far from an earth-shattering revelation, but it feels significant when it’s coming from someone like Burr, who previously seemed defiant and even proud of his limited emotional range. He was far from alone; if anything, he was part of a cultural moment that seems geared toward rewarding emotional repression and regressive forms of masculinity.

University of Birmingham sociologist Yuchen Yang points out that Burr’s sudden interest in chilling out is self-serving on an existential level. He has for many years served as the poster child for a kind of masculinity that, as Yang put it, “is not only harmful to women, queer, and people of color, but also detrimental to [men]’s own existence.”

“Dominant cultural beliefs about manhood often lead men into an unhealthy lifestyle,” Yang said. “Yet at the same time, the stigma around vulnerability also makes it difficult for men to seek help when needed,” he explains, pointing to therapy, medical invention, and simple wellness tactics as preferable alternatives to doubling down.

The real issue, Yang says, is that men are “chasing a cultural ideal that is far from realistic.” As he points out, “Very few men can actually achieve this ideal, and those who do get close to it can hardly embody it all the time.” In other words, even as men want to embody a patriarchal masculinity, they’re just as trapped by its societal expectations as everyone else.

Over the last decade, the “manosphere” — internet spaces focused on the lives and status of men, dominated by influencers and podcasters like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and a coterie of their peers — emerged as both a reaction to and worsening agent for this problem. Yang suggests its existence “is an attempt to resolve the inherent contradictions of patriarchy without overthrowing patriarchy.”

“Those in the manosphere want to recover men’s ‘natural’ masculinity,” he said, “but there is nothing ‘natural’ about the kind of masculinity they are invested in.”

While these online spaces give men a sense of community, they also foster growing misogyny, extremism, and disgruntlement. Men now are more isolated than ever, and compared to women, they’re dying younger and are more likely to die by causes including suicide, overdose, or complications from alcohol or drug abuse.

Throughout Drop Dead Years, Burr discusses his own struggle with alcohol addiction as well as the broader epidemic of sad men. (“The number one place to see sad men?” he jokes. “Guitar Center.”) Yet he seems to have not only recognized all of this, but decided to evolve in response. Burr makes the point that all of that repression of emotion takes a real toll on men’s health — notable in a special that references his awareness of dying throughout. “You start thinking about your life, you know?” he confesses. “You take stock in it. I start thinking about how fast my life’s going by, how quick my kids are growing up.”

None of this is quite as simple as “man realizes he wants to be a better person as he gets older.” What stands out to Ewert is his deep ambivalence about all of this. She notes that Burr often swings from serious discussion about his deepest fears and hopes to jabs about women — as if his gut reaction is to punch down in order to remind himself and others that he’s not on the bottom.

“I don’t see him making a coherent argument. I see a lot of reactions,” she says. “That’s relatable — I think that’s what a lot of men are going through.”

There’s a sense that Burr has been working out not only how to get in touch with his softer emotions, but how to do softer, less confrontational comedy in a way that still feels nuanced — comedy that we might think of as punching sideways instead of either of the expected directions.

At one point, he roasts his audience members for laughing at a joke he sets up about Joe Biden and dementia. “Not 30 seconds ago, when I said someone in my family got diagnosed [with dementia], you guys were all — you could hear a pin drop. And you had empathy,” he points out. “Second you put a blue or a red tie on it — ‘Fuck that old man! Fuck him! I’m glad he’s gonna die!’”

In recent years, comedy has been treated to a litany of comics, from Dave Chappelle to Louis C.K., who, when called out for various offenses, have doubled down on their commitment to disgruntlement. Burr, too, isn’t over the idea; he’s still frustrated that the rules about who gets canceled and who doesn’t are so inconsistent, still talking about how the social phenomenon has rendered him unable to insult someone who deserves it. “Even if he took my last slice of pizza and is denying it with pepperoni on his breath,” Burr says, “I can’t be like, ‘You fat, man-titted c**t.’”

But whatever Bill Burr might say about “cancel culture” as a corrective, in his case, he’s managed to do the one thing that the liberal backlash was seeking all along: listening and trying to be a little better. It’s the thing that none of those other comics got around to.

“I think he has been seeing the real rewards of emotional connection in his life,” Ewert said. Yelling on stage is one thing, she notes, “but at your house you realize that not yelling makes you feel better.”

“I think there’s hope in this message,” she continued. “If more of us could talk about men’s issues, about men’s mental health, as the result of a patriarchal system that puts all of us in a hierarchy, then that helps all of us.”