President Donald Trump’s administration deported eight immigrants to South Sudan, a dangerous country where most of the men have no ties, the Department of Homeland Security said Saturday.
The Friday night deportations come after two federal judges refused to block the move, citing recent rulings by the Supreme Court. The State Department warns Americans not to visit South Sudan “due to continued security threats.”
“These sickos will be in South Sudan by Independence Day,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on Thursday, calling it a “win for the rule of law, safety and security of the American people.”
Some of the immigrants, who were shown in a photo shackled by their hands and feet and surrounded by guards in an airplane, are from Cuba, Mexico, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. One of the men, Dian Peter Domach, is a citizen of South Sudan, according to DHS. The agency says the immigrants were convicted of crimes including murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault. The men had been held in a shipping container at a military base in Djibouti since May as they awaited court decisions. ABC News reported the news of their deportations to South Sudan Saturday morning.
The deportations are a major win for Trump, who has made cruel treatment of immigrants a hallmark of his administration. He previously deported hundreds of Venezuelan men to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process, and illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia there as well. The Trump administration complied with a Supreme Court order to bring Abrego Garcia back to America last month to face new criminal charges in Tennessee. Abrego Garcia recently described experiencing severe beatings and psychological torture, including sleep deprivation, while he was incarcerated in El Salvador.
While the Supreme Court issued rulings demanding the Trump administration respect immigrants’ right to due process and undo Abrego Garcia’s unlawful deportation to El Salvador, the court’s conservative supermajority recently greenlit the president’s efforts to send immigrants to third countries, or countries that are not their own.
The State Department tells Americans not to visit South Sudan “due to crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.” It adds: “Violent crime, such as carjackings, shootings, ambushes, assaults, robberies, and kidnappings are common throughout South Sudan, including Juba. Foreign nationals have been the victims of rape, sexual assault, armed robberies, and other violent crimes.”
However, the Supreme Court, with little explanation, lifted an injunction from Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts that had prohibited the administration from deporting the men to South Sudan. The court clarified its previous decision on the matter Thursday.
“What the government wants to do, concretely, is send the eight noncitizens it illegally removed from the United States from Djibouti to South Sudan, where they will be turned over to the local authorities without regard for the likelihood that they will face torture or death,” liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent. “Because ‘“the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law” in the context of removal proceedings,’ the government’s no-notice removals are undoubtedly illegal. In simple terms, the government requests that the court remove an obstacle to its achieving those unlawful ends.”
On Friday, Murphy denied an emergency appeal from the men’s lawyers to block their deportations. They argued the deportations were “impermissibly punitive” and their clients are likely to face torture.
Murphy wrote that the Supreme Court’s second ruling on this topic tied his hands. “This court interprets these Supreme Court orders as binding on this new petition,” he wrote.
“It is deeply troubling that the Supreme Court’s procedural ruling prevented a court from addressing the real fact that these deportations are unconstitutionally punitive,” Trina Realmuto, an attorney for the National Immigration Litigation Alliance who represented the men, told The New York Times.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss in Washington, D.C. had ordered the deportation to be temporarily paused earlier on Friday afternoon while transferring the case to Murphy.
“It seems to me almost self-evident that the United States government cannot take human beings and send them to circumstances in which their physical wellbeing is at risk simply either to punish them or send a signal to others,” Moss said at the hearing.
This should, indeed, be self-evident — but that’s not the America we live in now.
