The Trump administration succeeded in its quest to deport the eight men it imprisoned on a U.S. military base in Djibouti to violence-plagued South Sudan on Saturday, expanding its globe-spanning effort to banish immigrants to so-called third countries.
“After weeks of delays by activist judges that put our law enforcement in danger, ICE deported these 8 barbaric criminals [sic] illegal aliens to South Sudan,” Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Intercept in an email. The Trump administration reveled in a Thursday 7-2 Supreme Court decision granting its request to expel the men from Camp Lemonnier to the restive East African nation.
Their deportation marked a dramatic win for the Trump administration’s efforts to exile immigrants to countries other than the ones they hail from and which are notorious for violence and human rights violations.
More than a decade of intermittent political turmoil and outright civil war has left South Sudan politically unstable and ravaged by violence. Recent clashes between armed groups drove 165,000 people to flee their homes in three months, according to a June United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report. The country is subject to a U.N. warning about the potential for full-scale civil war and a U.S. State Department “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory.
The Trump administration abdicated the safety and legal fates of the eight men, only one of whom is South Sudanese, to the East African nation. The men were transported to a hotel in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, where they are under government supervision, according to Edmund Yakani, a longtime human rights defender in South Sudan and executive director of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, or CEPO.
Yakani told The Intercept that the men arrived by U.S. military flight on July 5 around 5 a.m. local time. A photo of the men released by DHS shows them onboard a transport plane, handcuffed and shackled at the feet, surrounded by camouflage-uniformed personnel.
“DHS deported these eight men to South Sudan, one of the most dangerous countries on the planet, without any opportunity to contest their deportations based on their fears of torture or death there. The U.S. State Department advises people to draft a will and to establish a proof of life protocol before traveling there,” Trina Realmuto, a lawyer for the immigrants in the case and executive director at National Immigration Litigation Alliance, told The Intercept.
