The United States has confirmed it completed the deportations of eight men to South Sudan, a day after a US judge cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s administration to send them to the violence-hit African country.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Saturday that the men were deported a day earlier, on US Independence Day on Friday, after they lost a last-minute legal bid to halt their transfer.
The eight detainees – immigrants from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Sudan and Vietnam – had been held under guard at a US military base in Djibouti for weeks.
A staffer working at Juba airport in South Sudan told the Reuters news agency that the aircraft carrying the men had arrived on Saturday at 6am local time (04:00 GMT). Their current location is not known.
In a statement, DHS said the eight men had been convicted of a range of crimes, including first-degree murder, robbery, drug trafficking and sexual assault.
Their case had become a flashpoint in ongoing legal battles over the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportations, including removals to so-called “third countries” where rights groups say deportees face safety risks and possible abuses.
“These third country deportations are wrong, period. And the United States should not be sending people to a literal war zone,” progressive Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal wrote on social media earlier this week, urging the deportations to be blocked.
The eight men had been held in a converted shipping container in Djibouti since late May, when an earlier deportation flight to South Sudan was halted by the courts over due process concerns.
The US Supreme Court has twice ruled that the Trump administration could deport them to countries outside of their homelands, issuing its latest decision on Thursday (PDF).
That same night, the eight detainees had filed an appeal, arguing that their “impermissibly punitive” deportation to South Sudan would violate the US Constitution, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment”.
But Judge Brian Murphy of Boston, whose rulings had previously halted efforts to begin deportations to the African country, ruled on Friday evening that the Supreme Court had tied his hands, clearing the way for the deportations to go ahead.
On Saturday, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin hailed the removals as “a win for the rule of law, safety and security of the American people”.
The US State Department advises citizens not to travel to South Sudan due to “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict”.
The United Nations has also warned that a political crisis embroiling the African country could reignite a brutal civil war that ended in 2018.
Last week, Blaine Bookey, legal director at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, condemned the US’s use of deportations to third countries.
“The administration’s increased use of third country transfers flies in the face of due process rights, the United States’ international legal obligations, and basic principles of human decency,” Bookey said in a statement.
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