Judge fires warning shot at cagey Trump officials: 'Seems like it may be contempt'

Trump administration officials got a dressing down from a federal judge on Tuesday over a planeload of migrants apparently being shipped to South Sudan, a country none of them are from, in possible violation of existing court orders, reported The New York Times.

This plane, and the legal complaint filed that mentioned it, was first flagged earlier in the day by American Immigration Council expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who noted that prior court rulings had said migrants must have greater notice and options to object when being sent to a country they have no ties to.

U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy's grilling "came at a hastily called hearing in Federal District Court in Boston where immigration lawyers said at least two migrants had been told they were going to be deported to the violence-plagued country in Africa," noted the report.

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"Earlier in the hearing, lawyers from the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project had said they had been told Monday that a client of theirs, a Burmese man, was informed that he would be deported to South Sudan," said the report. However, "when the lawyers checked on the man on Tuesday, they said, they were told that he had already been deported. Elsewhere, they said, a Vietnamese man 'appears to have suffered the same fate.'"

"After a break in the proceedings to gather information," according to the report, Perez then told Murphy the Burmese man had been deported back to his origin country of Myanmar, rather than South Sudan — however, she refused to reveal where the Vietnamese man had been sent, "saying it was classified information."

Murphy was not convinced by any of this, particularly after Perez refused to answer either where the plane to South Sudan was, or on what authority the government could arrange this flight in the first place.

“Based on what I have been told,” said Murphy, “this seems like it may be contempt.” He added that government officials, perhaps even including the pilots of the aircraft, could be sanctioned criminally.

Earlier this month, Murphy had similarly warned federal officials against a plan to ship a number of migrants to Libya; according to reports, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were throwing migrants in solitary confinement if they didn't agree to be expelled to that country, despite not having been from there.