A United States judge has rebuked the administration of President Donald Trump, saying that reports of deportations to South Sudan appear to violate his previous court order.
On Tuesday in Boston, Massachusetts, US District Court Judge Brian Murphy held a virtual hearing to weigh an emergency motion on behalf of deported migrants reportedly on board a flight to South Sudan.
He asked lawyers for the Trump administration to identify where the migrants were. He also indicated that he could ask for the flight to be turned around and called for the pilots to be made aware of his court order.
“Based on what I have been told, this seems like it may be contempt,” Judge Murphy told Elianis Perez, a lawyer for the Trump Justice Department.
Perez responded to Murphy’s requests for the plane’s whereabouts by saying the Department of Homeland Security had deemed such information “classified”. Perez also indicated that the Trump administration did not consider itself in violation of Murphy’s previous court order.
In a recent annual report, the US Department of State accused South Sudan of “significant human rights issues”, including torture and extrajudicial killings.
But the Trump administration has been looking abroad for destinations to send undocumented immigrants currently detained in the US, particularly those whose home countries will not accept them.
In Tuesday’s hearing, Judge Murphy said the flight to South Sudan appeared to violate a preliminary injunction he issued on April 18, which prohibited migrants from being deported to third-party countries that were not their own.
That injunction required the Trump administration to give the migrants an adequate opportunity to appeal their removal.
United Arab Emirates Dirham Exchange Rate
