WASHINGTON — Eight migrants with violent criminal convictions detained by the feds will be sent to South Sudan following a legal skirmish in two separate federal jurisdictions trying to halt their deportation.
Lawyers for the migrants filed another lawsuit on July 4 in Washington, DC, to pause their flight to the African nation after the Supreme Court ruled against them Thursday as part of an earlier suit that determined the Trump administration could proceed with the removals.
DC District Court Judge Randolph Moss, in response to the most recent suit, temporarily blocked the flight Friday — but shifted it back to the jurisdiction where the earlier lawsuit was filed in Boston.
Boston US District Judge Brian Murphy denied the request Friday, noting the high court’s decision allowing the flight to continue to South Sudan — despite having issued a May 21 order initially grounding it in Djibouti.
That order was stayed by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision last month that will let the Trump administration resume deporting migrants to countries other than their home nation — so-called “third countries” — with limited notice.
Murphy had still insisted that his injunction against the South Sudan deportations remained in “full force and effect,” prompting the latest clarification by the high court on Thursday.
Department of Justice attorneys in the Fourth of July hearings in DC said the flights were scheduled to depart Camp Lemonnier, a US Navy base where the migrants had been held for weeks, at 7 p.m. EST.
The migrants — all men who hailed from Cuba, Mexico, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam and Sudan — had been convicted of crimes including armed robbery, drug trafficking and sexual assault. Four are convicted murderers.
“These sickos will be in South Sudan by Independence Day,” said Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in a statement Thursday.
“A win for the rule of law, safety and security of the American people. We thank our brave ICE law enforcement for their sacrifice to defend our freedoms.”
South Sudan has been marred by violence and armed conflict following a civil war that concluded in 2018, prompting the migrants’ lawyers to argue their deportation would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against “cruel and unusual” punishments.
The Trump administration has claimed the men committed crimes so “monstrous and barbaric” that no other country would take them.
Murphy’s late May order marooned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers along with the migrants in Djibouti, without anti-malaria medications and potentially exposed to rocket attacks from Houthi terrorists across the Red Sea in Yemen, Pentagon officials said.
The Boston judge decided the flight had “unquestionably” violated a March court order pausing migrant removals to third countries and ruled that each should first be given written notice and offered a chance to object to their deportation.
All eight of the migrant convicts had either been given final removal orders or did not appeal their initial deportation order following a conviction, a DHS source previously told The Post.
Even liberal Justice Elena Kagan sided with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority Thursday in overruling Murphy’s order on third-country deportations.
“I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed,” she wrote in a concurring opinion, though she did not join the majority in the June 23 decision greenlighting the removals.
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