Matt Ford has been thinking lately about his 11th great grandparents.

Early settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they lived in what is now Essex County.

Their names were Lawrence and Cassandra Southick. Ford discovered the connection with his

ancestors when he started digging into his genealogy as a hobby a few years ago. The Southwark's story was interesting because they were Quakers living under a very Puritan government,

so they were banished from the community.

It was from being Quakers, yeah.

The court levied it as a formal punishment, maybe under blasphemy or heresy laws.

I don't know the exact statute they would have cited, but that was the general purpose of it.

They fled to Shelter Island in New York.

According to their memorial, according to some of the records that survive, they died of exposure and maltreatment shortly thereafter.

They were already elderly when it happened, so it was probably quite an ordeal for them to be removed from their community and sent elsewhere.

It was a sentence of banishment that became a de facto death sentence, it sounds like.

More or less, yeah.

I think that, you know, for people who are banished from their community, it amounts to a sort

of civil death, which is why you usually see legal commentators refer to it as sort of

one step below the death penalty.

Matt Ford is a staff writer at the New Republic.

And he has been thinking about the Southwicks because banishment is suddenly back on the table.

How many illegal criminals are you planning on exporting to El Salvador and President Bucheli? How many are you willing to take from the U.S.?

As many as possible.

President Trump has already sent plain loads of immigrants to a maximum security prison in El Salvador

for indefinite detention. The legality of that move is being fought out in the courts. But at an Oval Office

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