After a deportation flight with eight migrants left Texas reportedly intended for South Sudan this week, a federal judge on Wednesday ruled that the Trump administration had violated a previous order.
U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts said at a hearing that the administration had failed to adhere to an injunction he issued in March that prevented people from being sent to countries other than their own without opportunities to raise fears of persecution or torture.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Wednesday morning that eight people from Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, Mexico and South Sudan had been deported this week. According to DHS, many of them had violent criminal convictions, including murder and sexual assault.
“The department’s actions,” Murphy said, “are unquestionably violative of this court’s order.”
The White House stood by its actions.
“The Trump Administration removed dangerous criminal illegal aliens from America in full compliance with all court orders,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement Wednesday evening. “We are confident in the legality of our actions and do not apologize for acting to protect the American people.”
Government attorneys said that the migrants are in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and that the plane has since landed. They declined to share the location of the plane’s final destination.
NBC News confirmed a plane left Harlingen, Texas around noon on Tuesday and landed in Djibouti. Court documents show the migrants were at Port Isabel ICE processing center, which is about 30 min from Harlingen airport. Harlingen is one of the three locations where ICE runs deportation flights.
In a written order Wednesday night, Murphy ordered that the individuals removed from the U.S. "be given a reasonable fear interview in private, with the opportunity for the individual to have counsel of their choosing present during the interview.” Murphy said they must be allowed all the access they would have otherwise received in the United States.
“The Court is not — in ordering this remedy — making any findings or conclusions that compliance with these processes before deportation would have satisfied the requirements of its Preliminary Injunction in the first instance,” the judge wrote.
Murphy, who relayed the sequence of events leading to the deportations after more than 30 minutes in a sealed proceeding, said the people were notified of their destination “sometime in the evening” Monday, outside business hours. He added that they left the ICE facility en route to a nearby airport the next morning at 9:35 CT.
Without sufficient time to consult an attorney or family members, the judge said, it was “impossible” for those people to “have a meaningful opportunity to object” to their deportations to a third country.
“The non-citizens at issue had fewer than 24 hours’ notice, and zero business hours’ notice, before being put on a plane and sent to a country” for which the U.S. has issued a “do not travel” order, Murphy wrote, making very clear the parameters of his refined order — which includes a new nationwide 10-day window allowing migrants to provide a fear-based claim before being removed from the U.S.
A State Department travel advisory warns Americans not to go to South Sudan “due to crime, kidnapping and armed conflict” and notes that in March, because of conditions on the ground, it “ordered the departure of non-emergency U.S. government employees from South Sudan.”
Immigration attorneys told Murphy that at least two of their clients, from Myanmar and Vietnam, were deported Tuesday morning to South Sudan.
It’s possible one of the migrants, Nyo Mint, might have been diverted to his home country, Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), but his San Antonio-based immigration attorney, Jonathan Ryan, said that he is still in the dark about where his client was, and that he has been “disappeared.”
“I have not heard from my client,” Ryan said. “How am I supposed to take their word that they sent him to Burma?”
Ryan said the government is acting as if due process is a privilege, saying it is a problem “when we stop doing due process for unpopular people.”
At a DHS news conference before the hearing, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told reporters about the migrants that “no country on Earth wanted to accept them because their crimes were so uniquely barbaric.”
McLaughlin also criticized the court system.
“Activist judges are on the other side, fighting to get them back onto the United States soil,” she said.
South Sudan could be headed for another civil war. A 2018 power-sharing agreement between President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar ended five years of civil war. But earlier this year, violent clashes between the factions ramped up once again.
Murphy this month blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to deport people from the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos and other countries to Libya. Then, he reaffirmed his injunction on third-country deportations in response to an emergency motion from the migrants’ lawyers.
