A United States judge has rebuked the administration of President Donald Trump, saying that reports of deportations to South Sudan appear to violate his previous court order.
On Tuesday in Boston, Massachusetts, US District Court Judge Brian Murphy held a virtual hearing to weigh an emergency motion on behalf of deported migrants reportedly on board a flight to South Sudan.
He asked lawyers for the Trump administration to identify where the migrants were. He also indicated that he could ask for the flight to be turned around and called for the pilots to be made aware of his court order.
“Based on what I have been told, this seems like it may be contempt,” Judge Murphy told Elianis Perez, a lawyer for the Trump Justice Department.
Perez responded to Murphy’s requests for the plane’s whereabouts by saying the Department of Homeland Security had deemed such information “classified”. Perez also indicated that the Trump administration did not consider itself in violation of Murphy’s previous court order.
In a recent annual report, the US Department of State accused South Sudan of “significant human rights issues”, including torture and extrajudicial killings.
But the Trump administration has been looking abroad for destinations to send undocumented immigrants currently detained in the US, particularly those whose home countries will not accept them.
In Tuesday’s hearing, Judge Murphy said the flight to South Sudan appeared to violate a preliminary injunction he issued on April 18, which prohibited migrants from being deported to third-party countries that were not their own.
That injunction required the Trump administration to give the migrants an adequate opportunity to appeal their removal.
The migrants, Judge Murphy ruled, were simply seeking “an opportunity to explain why such a deportation will likely result in their persecution, torture, and/or death”.
He cited the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to due process: in other words, a fair hearing in the US court system.
Earlier this month, on May 7, lawyers for the migrants had indicated that their clients were slated to be sent to Libya, another country with significant human rights concerns.
Judge Murphy, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ruled that such a deportation would be in violation of his injunction.
In Tuesday’s emergency court filing, the lawyers for those migrants emphasised how close a call that incident was. The migrants in question were already on a bus, sitting on the tarmac of an airport, when they were ordered to be returned.
The emergency motion identifies the migrants only by their initials and countries of origin, Myanmar and Vietnam among them.
But it explains what allegedly happened to them over the last 24 hours and seeks immediate action from the court.
The lawyers allege that one migrant from Myanmar, called NM in the court filings, received a notice of removal on Monday. It identified the destination as South Africa. Within 10 minutes, the court filing said the email was recalled by its sender.
A couple of hours later, a new notice of removal was allegedly sent, this time naming South Sudan as the destination.
In both instances, NM refused to sign the document. Lawyers in the emergency petition indicate that NM has “limited English proficiency” and was not provided a translator to understand the English-language document.
While one of NM’s lawyers stated her intention to meet with him on Tuesday morning, by the time their appointment time came, she was informed he had already been removed from his detention facility, en route to South Sudan.
The emergency filing includes a copy of an email sent to the lawyers from a family member of those deported.
“I believe my husband [name redacted] and 10 other individuals that were sent to Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, TX were deported to South Africa or Sudan,” the email begins.
“This is not right! I fear my husband and his group, which consist of people from Laos, Thailand, Pakistan, Korea, and Mexico are being sent to South Africa or Sudan against their will. Please help! They cannot be allowed to do this.”