(CN) - The Trump administration "unquestionably" and "obviously" violated a court order when it loaded eight men on a plane and deported them to the politically unstable South Sudan without due process, a federal judge said Wednesday.
Homeland Security Department officials say that they flew the eight immigrants - who they claim are "barbaric, violent individuals" illegally in the U.S. - from Texas on Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, a Joe Biden appointee, called an emergency hearing after immigration attorneys flagged that two of their clients were on that plane, potentially in violation of Murphy's order barring the Trump administration from removing people to countries not their own without 15 days warning.
Homeland Security identified those two men on Wednesday as Nyo Myint, a citizen of Burma, and Tuan Thanh Phan, a Vietnamese national. The department claims that Myint was in prison for first-degree sexual assault, while Phan was convicted of first-degree murder and second-degree assault.
The other men on the flight came from Cuba, Laos, Mexico and South Sudan.
"We are removing these convicted criminals from American soil so they can never hurt another American victim, an American man, child or woman," Homeland Security's assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said at a news conference on Wednesday.
McLaughlin insisted that the department is "fully compliant with the law and court orders."
But Murphy disagreed, asserting that federal immigration officials ran afoul of his order to provide "meaningful" due process to targets of deportation who are being removed to places where they have no ties.
"I find that my preliminary injunction order has been violated," Murphy said at the Wednesday hearing, adding that "everybody who was involved" in illegal deportations risks criminal contempt.
The judge said that last week's Supreme Court decision, which ruled that the Trump administration violated the rights of Venezuelan migrants by expediting deportations, found that providing deportation targets with 24 hours notice isn't enough to give them the opportunity to challenge it.
In this case, Murphy said that the Trump administration didn't even give the men on the South Sudan flight 24 hours notice - it gave them just 17 hours.
"And this is undeniably insufficient to the point where I believe it to be obviously insufficient," Murphy said.
As it stands, the men remain in South Sudan "on the tarmac," according to the judge. They are still technically in U.S. custody as the court determines where they should be housed. It's possible Murphy orders them returned to the U.S. if the men express a credible fear of torture.
The Trump administration wasted no time on Wednesday denouncing Murphy as a "far-left activist judge."
"A local judge in Massachusetts is trying to force the United States to bring back these uniquely barbaric monsters who present a clear and present threat to the safety of the American people and American victims," McLaughlin said in a statement distributed by the White House on Wednesday afternoon. "While we are fully compliant with the law and court orders, it is absolutely absurd for a district judge to try and dictate the foreign policy and national security of the United States of America."
The White House distributed that statement hours before Wednesday's hearing wrapped up and well before Murphy mulled bringing the removed men back to the U.S. At the time of writing, the judge still hasn't determined what relief to grant following the government's violation of his order.
Immigration attorneys warned Murphy on Tuesday about the danger their clients face in South Sudan, "the world's youngest country." They penned a memo to the judge describing that a "long flawed" peace deal aimed at quelling the country's civil unrest "finally collapsed this week."
As a result, their clients are now being flown "into a country that is now returning to a full-blown and catastrophic civil war."
Additionally, South Sudan's detention facilities are rife with human rights violations, the attorneys claim. The country's intelligence agency "effectively operates outside the law," they argue, maintaining its own prisons where torture and poor conditions are commonplace.
After the half-day hearing, Murphy said he expects to issue a ruling on relief Wednesday evening.
Source: Courthouse News Service
