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.
District Court Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts said during a hearing that the Trump administration had failed to adhere to his injunction, issued in March, preventing individuals from being sent to a country other than their own without giving them an opportunity to raise fears of persecution or torture.
The judge’s ruling comes after the Department of Homeland Security confirmed during a press briefing Wednesday morning that eight individuals from Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, Mexico and South Sudan were deported this week. According to the DHS, many of these individuals had violent criminal convictions, including murder and sexual assault.
“The department’s actions,” Murphy said, “are unquestionably violative of this court’s order.”
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, the department “ordered the departure of non-emergency U.S. government employees from South Sudan.”
Government attorneys said that the migrants are still in ICE custody, and that the plane has since landed. They declined to share the location of the plane’s final destination.
Murphy, who relayed publicly the sequence of events leading to the deportation of these individuals after spending more than 30 minutes in a sealed proceeding, said the individuals were notified of their destination “sometime in the evening” on Monday, outside business hours. He added that they left the ICE facility the next morning at the latest in the 10 a.m. hour and at the earliest before 9 a.m.
Without sufficient time to consult an attorney or family members, the judge said that it was “impossible” for those individuals to “have a meaningful opportunity to object” to their deportation to a third country.
The hearing comes after immigration attorneys told Murphy that at least two of their clients, from Myanmar and Vietnam, were allegedly deported Tuesday morning to South Sudan.
It’s possible one of the migrants, Nyo Mint, might have been diverted to his home country of Burma but his San Antonio-based immigration attorney Jonathan Ryan says he is still in the dark about where his client is right now and says 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 says the government is acting as if due process is a privilege saying it’s a problem “when we stop doing due process for unpopular people.”
During a DHS press conference ahead of the hearing, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told reporters of 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 have ramped up once again.
Earlier this month, Murphy blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to deport individuals from countries including the Philippines, Vietnam and Laos to Libya. Then, Murphy had reaffirmed his injunction on third country deportations in response to an emergency motion from the migrants’ lawyers.
