The Human Rights of Non-citizens 9 higher obligations in its treatment of children, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Without ratification, the Trump administration’s family separation policy “would doubtless have elicited more vigorous international protest had the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child been afforded oversight.” And although a US court was able to halt family separation as unconstitutional, government officials were unable to comply with the order to reunify children with their families because it had no “clear or centralized tracking system.” Bhabha also depicts the administration’s efforts to overturn Flores,33 the seminal Supreme Court case governing child migration detention. This chapter illustrates the nuances of “law” as a tool. Law has tremendous power to provide a platform for halting discriminatory government practices, but it can also be used to challenge long-standing precedent like Flores on which families have come to rely, camouflaging exclusionary politics under a veneer of neutrality. Chapter 4 by Azadeh Dastyari and Asher Hirsch, “Australia’s Extraterritorial Border Control Policies,” further illustrates the inadequacy of law to ensure rights. Technically, states are obligated under international treaties to provide certain rights to individuals once they reach the state’s territory. States are rendering this obligation increasingly meaningless by extending the reach of their immigration policies beyond their borders to ensure that no refugees reach their territory and exercise these rights. The authors highlight how “non-entrée policies” are more readily enforced in Australia because of its isolation and lack of land borders. They outline measures to stop irregular arrivals of refugees by air and sea, which have increased in intensity in the past decade despite human rights advocacy. Consistent with other chapters in this part, including those of Belton and Liew, Bhabha, and Ceciliano, Golash-Boza, and Rubén González (discussed later), Dastyari and Hirsch underscore that Australia’s policy response toward refugees aligns with “the view that a refugee is a potential threat, rather than someone fleeing from harm.” Here they amplify Nyers’ point that states in the Global North have deployed a non-entrée regime “under the guise of an orderly and regular system” and are most concerned with protecting host states’ interests.34 Dastyari and Hirsch showcase the ways in which Australia has been avoiding its treaty obligations by exploiting loopholes through their non-entrée measures such as extraterritorial processing and detention, interdiction at sea, and carrier sanctions. Dastyari and Hirsch argue, however, that Australia’s refugee response is still illegal under the Refugee Convention, because while “states may not have a duty to grant asylum, they do have an obligation to provide access to their asylum procedures.” This access is key to refugees having their rights recognized and fulfilled and for Australia to avoid running afoul of its binding legal obligations. 33 34 Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292 (1993). Nyers, “Humanitarian Hubris,” p. 172. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press