After a deportation flight with eight migrants left Texas for South Sudan this week, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration had violated a previous order.
The judge of the Brian Murphy district court in Massachusetts said during an hearing that the Trump administration had not adhered to its judicial mandate, issued in March, preventing people from being sent to a country that is not their own without giving them the opportunity to increase the fears of persecution or torture.
The judge’s ruling occurs after the National Security Department confirmed during a press conference on Wednesday morning that eight people from Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, Mexico and South Sudan were deported this week. According to the DHS, many of these people had violent criminal sentences, such as murder and sexual assault.
“The actions of the department,” Murphy said, “unquestionably they violate the order of this court.”
A travel advice from the State Department warns of Americans who do not go to South Sudan, “due to crime, kidnapping and armed conflict” and points out that in March, due to the conditions in the field, the department “ordered the game of employees of the United States not emergency of South Sudan.”
The government lawyers said that migrants are still in ice custody and that the plane has landed since then. They refused to share the location of the final destination of the plane.
Murphy, who publicly transmitted the sequence of events that led to the deportation of these people after spending more than 30 minutes in a sealed procedure, said that people were notified of their destination “at some point in the night” on Monday, outside commercial hours. He added that they left the ice facilities the next morning at the latest at 10 am and as soon as possible before 9 am
Without enough time to consult a lawyer or relatives, the judge said it was “impossible” that these people “have a significant opportunity to object to their deportation to a third country.
The hearing occurs after immigration lawyers told Murphy that at least two of its clients, of Myanmar and Vietnam, were supposedly deported Tuesday morning to South Sudan.
It is possible that one of the migrants, Nyo Mint, has been diverted to his country of origin of Burma, but his immigration lawyer based in San Antonio, Jonathan Ryan, says that he is still in the dark about where his client is at this time and says he has been “missing.”
“I haven’t had news from my client,” Ryan said. “How are I supposed to take his word that he was sent to Burma?”
Ryan says that the government is acting as if due process was a privilege that says it is a problem “when we stop doing due process for unpopular people.”
South Sudan could go to another civil war. A 2018 shared power agreement between President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar, ended five years of civil war. But earlier this year, the violent clashes between the factions have increased once more.
Earlier this month, Murphy blocked the Trump administration attempt to deport people from countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam and Libya. Then, Murphy had reaffirmed his court order on the deportations of the third country in response to an emergency motion of migrant lawyers.
