Eight male deportees who were sent out of the United States in May and held for weeks at a US military base in Djibouti have since been relocated to South Sudan a country the US State Department advises against visiting because of fighting with weapons, crime, and kidnapping.
The eight men, who are nationals of Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam, and South Sudan, arrived in the war-torn African nation on Friday after the Supreme Court paved the way for their deportation. The officials of Homeland Security said all eight had been convicted of violent offenses during their stay in the US.
This was a victory for the rule of law, security, and safety of the American people,” Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement released on Saturday.
Their deportation had been postponed in May when a federal judge held that the administration had defied court orders by refusing to let the men contest their deportation. The flights were diverted to an American base in Djibouti, where the men were detained in a converted shipping container as legal proceedings went on.
The conservative-dominated Supreme Court decided in June that immigration officials could speedily deport people to third nations, overruling a lower court’s previous ruling that permitted immigrants to fight such deportations.
After a sequence of emergency proceedings on July 4, a temporary injunction was granted, but the Boston judge presiding over the case eventually said his powers had been cut short by the Supreme Court.
ICE officials confirmed that the men had terminal removal orders. The US has also made agreements with other countries willing to accept temporarily those who can’t be sent back directly to their country of origin. Even with international agencies’ warnings of instability in South Sudan, the transfer has been finalized under the Trump administration’s third-country deportation policy.
