A federal judge on Saturday denounced the Trump administration for what she said appeared to be a deliberate scheme to ignore court-ordered protections for a group of deported immigrants who feared persecution in their home countries of Nigeria and Gambia.
But Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia appeared reluctant to order the return of the five migrants to the United States, instead asking the government to submit a sworn statement detailing its efforts to prevent the deportations of the people to their home countries. Repatriating the migrants would violate the protections they had received from immigration judges in the United States.
An emergency hearing in the case on Saturday demonstrated how the Supreme Court had paved the way for the deportation of the five migrants in the case, and for President Trump’s mass deportation campaign more broadly.
Though she appeared highly skeptical of the government’s arguments, Judge Chutkan said that her “hands may be tied,” and expressed doubt that a ruling in the migrants’ favor would survive on appeal, pointing to several recent legal victories for the Trump administration’s deportation policies.
Judge Chutkan ultimately did not instruct the government to take specific action on the five deported migrants, and gave lawyers in the case more time to prepare their arguments. It is unclear if more members of the group of deported migrants will soon be deported to their home countries.
In a recent deal with the Trump administration, Ghana agreed to accept deported migrants with no connection to the West African nation. Federal officials then deported 14 migrants to Ghana last week, five of whom had judges’ orders preventing their deportation to their home countries of Nigeria and Gambia.
But the five migrants were told by U.S. and Ghanaian officials that they would be sent to their home countries anyway, according to court filings. One of them — a bisexual man from Gambia, where same-sex relationships are criminalized — was sent on Wednesday from Ghana to his home country.
The other four plaintiffs are still in Ghana, and have been told by officials there that their deportations were imminent.
Even as Judge Chutkan scolded the Trump administration for allowing Ghanaian officials to violate orders by U.S. immigration judges, she also appeared to suggest that she had little power to compel the government to return the migrants, at least for now.
“I have not been shy about saying that I think this is a very suspicious scheme,” she said during a hearing on Saturday, adding that the Supreme Court had blocked a lower court decision in a similar case earlier this year, “and there’s no point in getting decisions from me that are immediately going to be stayed.”
Judge Chutkan’s remarks, as well as her reluctance to compel the government to return the migrants, amounted to a significant victory for the Trump administration in its mass deportation campaign. The Supreme Court has broadly allowed the government to deport migrants to countries other than their own, and had paused a federal judge’s ruling that said the migrants must first be given a chance to show that they would be at risk of torture.
Justice Department lawyers, in defending the deportations, did not dispute that Ghana sending the migrants to their home countries would violate their court-ordered protections. The lawyers instead leaned on an argument that the Trump administration had previously used in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, effectively saying that once a migrant had been removed from the United States and was in foreign custody, the issue was out of their hands.
“The United States is not saying that this is OK,” Elianis N. Pérez, a Justice Department lawyer, said during the hearing. “What the United States is saying is that the United States does not have the power to tell Ghana what to do.”
Judge Chutkan appeared skeptical of that argument, saying that “the lack of that power appears to be by design,” and that it was intended as an “end run around the United States’ obligations.”
She added: “You send these individuals knowing you can’t repatriate them. You send them to Ghana, and you say, ‘Oh, but Ghana says they’re not going to send them home.’ And Ghana immediately prepares to send them home with what appears to be your full awareness. How is this not a violation of your obligation?”
The case echoes Mr. Abrego Garcia’s in other ways. One type of legal protection for the five migrants includes a status called “withholding of removal,” the same protection that should have prevented Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation to his home country of El Salvador. He has continued to fight a labyrinthine legal battle against his deportation, and the Trump administration has now sought to deport him to several other African countries that have also agreed to accept deported migrants — a so-called third-country deportation.
The five plaintiffs in the Ghana case, identified only by their initials for fear of persecution in their home counties, are citizens of Nigeria and Gambia, and have been described in court filings by their lawyers as having “abysmal” living conditions in a remote detention facility known as Dema Camp, at an undisclosed location in Ghana.
One man, known in court records as K.S., was deported to Gambia despite the fact that he had been granted a legal protection preventing deportation to his home country on the basis of his sexuality. K.S. is a bisexual man, and Gambia criminalizes relationships between men with a maximum penalty of life in prison. K.S., according to a court filing, is now in hiding in Gambia and fears for his life.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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