Being removable from a country disrupts a life long before anyone is put on a plane. The mere possibility of expulsion brings chronic waiting and anxiety, so people's existence is interrupted while they are still physically present.
For most people facing a life-altering official decision, feeling that their case was genuinely listened to mattered more than whether they won or lost. Fair hearing, not just outcome, is what people judge the process by.
People threatened with expulsion often push back not by evading the state but by obeying its controls to the letter: reporting on time and keeping every rule. They do this to refute the label of dangerous rule-breaker, so the surveillance tools of detention and reporting become the stage on which they assert their good character.
When a legal process threatens to separate a family, people start to think of their family life as a human right to be argued, not just a set of lived relationships. The stress also spreads past the individual to partners, parents and children, so the whole household lives under the threat.
Officials may describe sending someone to their country of citizenship as a return home, but for people whose lives are rooted where they live, it is exile. What counts as home is set by lived ties, not by a passport.