A federal judge is blocking Donald Trump’s administration from deporting a group of Laotian, Vietnamese and Filipino immigrants to Libya after lawyers cited “alarming” reports that the flights to the war-torn African nation were “imminent.”
Massachusetts District Judge Brian E. Murphy granted a temporary restraining order on Wednesday that temporarily blocks the government from so-called “third-country removals” until targeted immigrants have a meaningful chance to challenge the action in court.
An emergency filing from attorneys for the immigrants warned that the government would be “blatantly” defying a court order that prohibits those removals, which lawyers feared were being prepared on U.S. military flights scheduled as early as Wednesday.
Judge Murphy said the government would “clearly violate” his court order if those flights took off, delivering a stiff warning to administration officials after several federal judges have sparred with government attorneys about similar orders against swift removals that appeared to defy court orders against them.
He cited his court order from April 18, which requires third-country removals to have a written notice in a language that the targeted immigrants can understand, “as well as a meaningful opportunity for the non-citizen to raise a fear-based claim” for protection from removal.
“If there is any doubt — the Court sees none — the allegedly imminent removals, as reported by news agencies and as Plaintiffs seek to corroborate with class-member accounts and public information, would clearly violate this Court’s Order,” Murphy wrote.
Asked on Wednesday whether he is aware that federal immigration authorities are preparing deportation flights to Libya, the president said: “I don't know. You'll have to ask Homeland Security.”
The filings follow a frantic 24 hours during which lawyers scrambled to reach their clients and the courts after Reuters and The New York Times reported the administration’s plans to send immigrants to Libya, which Libya’s rival governments said they would flatly reject.
The State Department even advises Americans against traveling to Libya “due to crime, terrorism, unexploded land mines, civil unrest, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”
The country remains divided following years of unrest and instability in the wake of a coup against longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. The United Nations recognizes a government from Tripoli, while eastern Libya is governed by general-turned-warlord Khalifa Haftar.
“Libya refuses to be a destination for the deportation of migrants under any pretext,” Tripoli-based prime minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh wrote on social media Wednesday.
The removal of immigrants from the United States to Libya would mark a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration platform, which already has sent several planes to Latin American countries, including El Salvador, where dozens of deportees are imprisoned in a notorious jail condemned by human rights groups as a “tropical gulag” and concentration camp.
Libya is also “notoriously perilous for refugees and migrants, who often suffer a litany of abuses, including at the country’s numerous detention facilities,” according to the Global Detention Project.
Conditions at such facilities, often under the control of militia groups, are “deplorable,” and detainees routinely experience overcrowding, torture, food and water shortages and forced labor, according to the group. Amnesty International has labeled immigrant detention in Libya a “hellscape.”
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