A frustrated federal judge accused Donald Trump’s administration of “manufacturing chaos” after the government failed to give a group of deportees due process and violated court orders against removal flights to war-torn South Sudan.
District Judge Brian Murphy last week warned that administration officials could face contempt charges after violating his weeks-old court order against summary removals of immigrants without “meaningful” notice before they are sent to countries where they could face violence or death.
He then allowed the government — by its own request — to hold those deportees overseas, in U.S. custody, while giving them a chance to receive a “reasonable fear interview” to explain how they would face persecution or torture in South Sudan. They are currently being held on a military base in Djibouti.
But government attorneys have now “changed their tune,” Murphy wrote in a late-night order on Monday. “It turns out that having immigration proceedings on another continent is harder and more logistically cumbersome” than the administration anticipated, he said.
Murphy, who was appointed by Joe Biden, has faced a barrage of attacks from the White House, which labeled him a “far-left activist” who is trying to “protect the violent criminal illegal immigrants.” Trump called him “absolutely out of control” and accused him of “hurting our country.”
White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller has derided Murphy as a “local city judge” who is endangering Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
In a Truth Social post on Memorial Day, Trump raged against “USA hating judges who suffer from an ideology that is sick and very dangerous for our country.”
“Hopefully the United States Supreme Court, and other good and compassionate judges throughout the land, will save us from the decisions of the monsters who want our country to go to hell,” he wrote in an all-caps message on Monday.
During a hearing last week, Murphy found that the government violated a court order that deportees receive notice of their removal — in a language they can understand — with at least 15 days to challenge it. Instead, deportees were given fewer than 16 hours’ notice.
“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.”
Murphy said he restrained himself by not ordering the government to “simply return” the men so they can receive due process in the United States. “Instead, the Court accepted Defendants’ own suggestion that they be allowed to keep the individuals out of the country and finish their process abroad,” he wrote.
“To be clear, the Court recognizes that the class members at issue here have criminal histories. But that does not change due process,” he wrote. “The Court treats its obligation to these principles with the seriousness that anyone committed to the rule of law should understand.”
Murphy denied a request from government attorneys to block his earlier order.
In court, government attorneys characterized the administration’s failures to comply with his court orders “as a big misunderstanding,” according to Murphy.
“From this course of conduct, it is hard to come to any conclusion other than that Defendants invite lack of clarity as a means of evasion,” he wrote.
The class-action case in Murphy’s court — involving several deportees challenging their removal — is among several high-profile immigration cases playing out in federal courts across the country.
Immigration officials have raced to deport immigrants to El Salvador as well as war-torn African countries including Libya and South Sudan — often with little notice or opportunity for a lawyer, raising alarms among judges, attorneys and legal aid groups that the administration is willfully denying due process rights as Trump pushes for sweeping deportations for potentially millions of immigrants.
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