Tom Homan, the US border czar, has said he does not know what happened to the eight men deported to South Sudan after the Trump administration resumed sending migrants to countries that are not their place of origin, known as third countries.
“They’re free as far as we’re concerned. They’re free, they’re no longer in our custody, they’re in Sudan,” Homan told Politico on Friday. “Will they stay in Sudan? I don’t know.”
Administration officials said the men had been convicted of violent crimes in the US. Only one of the eight reportedly has a connection to South Sudan, which recently emerged from a civil war. The others include two people from Myanmar, two from Cuba, and one each from Vietnam, Laos and Mexico.
South Sudanese authorities said on Tuesday the men were in custody in Juba “under the care of the relevant authorities, who are screening them and ensuring their safety and wellbeing”.
The men were initially deported in May, but were held on a military base in Djibouti for weeks after a US court stopped their removal.
They were then transported to South Sudan after two US supreme court decisions: one that broadly allowed for the administration to deport migrants to third countries to which they have no connection, and a second that weighed in directly on the case of the eight men.
“We make arrangements to make sure these countries are receiving these people and there’s opportunities for people, but I can’t tell you – if we removed somebody to Sudan they could stay there a week and leave, I don’t know,” Homan said.
He later added: “There’s like a 100 different endings to this – I just don’t know on every specific case what their status is.”
The administration has also controversially deported Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, where they are held in a notorious prison. The administration has reportedly also approached countries such as Costa Rica, Panama and Rwanda about accepting migrants.
Homan has been called the intellectual “father” of a policy on migrants enacted in the first Trump administration to separate children from their families, according to an investigation in 2022 by the Atlantic.
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