US immigration officials have begun deporting about 12 South Asian migrants to South Sudan, according to a Tuesday court filing and media reports.
US District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston during a hastily arranged virtual hearing ordered the White House to not let the group of migrants leave the custody of US immigration authorities after saying they appeared to have been deported in violation of a court order.
While he was not going to order the airplane to turn around, that was an option the US Department of Homeland Security could employ to comply with his order, he said.
Photo: Reuters
Murphy warned that officials could be held in criminal contempt if he found they violated his previous order barring the swift deportation of migrants to countries other than their own before they could raise any concerns that they might face torture or persecution.
“I have a strong indication that my preliminary injunction order has been violated,” Murphy told Elianis Perez, a lawyer with the US Department of Justice.
Immigration lawyers learned from a detention officer’s e-mail that a Burmese national, identified as “N.M.” was “removed ... to South Sudan,” they wrote in a filing seeking the court’s intervention and the return of the migrants.
A second migrant, a Vietnamese national identified as “T.T.P.” in the filing, “appears to have suffered the same fate,” along with at least 10 others.
The lawyers said they had last filed an emergency motion on May 7, after media reports indicated immigration officials were seeking to deport N.M. and others to Libya and Saudia Arabia.
The court had sided with plaintiffs and “the men were ultimately transported back to an immigration detention center after remaining on a bus on the base’s tarmac for three or four hours,” the filing said.
The filing also said that a flawed peace deal in South Sudan collapsed this week, and N.M. is being flown “into a country that is now returning to full-blown and catastrophic civil war.”
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