A federal judge angrily rejected the Trump administration's request to reverse his order to give due process to migrants deported to South Sudan.
In a scathing 17-page order, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy threw the administration's lawyers' words back into their faces to show they had argued in bad faith that meaningful immigration proceedings could be conducted overseas, and found the administration had violated his preliminary injunction.
"Since that hearing, merely five days ago, Defendants have changed their tune," Murphy wrote. "It turns out that having immigration proceedings on another continent is harder and more logistically cumbersome than Defendants anticipated."
The Trump administration flew immigrants to war-ravaged South Sudan earlier this month despite a court order requiring ICE to give people being deported to a country that's not their own a chance to argue their concerns in court. Trump administration lawyers claimed that could be done after arrival in the countries.
Murphy made clear the deportees should be given adequate notice and opportunity to raise fears of persecution or torture before they were taken to third countries, and he said the administration had raised red herrings to avoid complying with his order.
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"However, the Court never said that Defendants had to convert their foreign military base into an immigration facility; it only left that as an option, again, at Defendants’ request," Murphy wrote. "The other option, of course, has always been to simply return to the status quo of roughly one week ago, or else choose any other location to complete the required process."
Only one of the eight deportees, who are currently being held in Djibouti, is a South Sudanese national. Another was expected to be returned to Myanmar.
"Defendants have mischaracterized this Court’s order, while at the same time manufacturing the very chaos they decry," Murphy wrote. "By racing to get six class members onto a plane to unstable South Sudan, clearly in breach of the law and this Court’s order, Defendants gave this Court no choice but to find that they were in violation of the Preliminary Injunction."
