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President Donald Trump’s administration is working to ramp up its pointless cruelty toward immigrants, and has apparently been plotting to have the military send Asian immigrants to Libya imminently, according to immigration lawyers.
The plan to deport immigrants to Libya, a war-torn country known for widespread mistreatment of migrants, would represent not just a likely human rights violation but another brazen act of defiance toward the federal judiciary.
Last month, a federal judge in Massachusetts issued an injunction barring the Trump administration from deporting any noncitizen to a third country — a country that is not their country of origin — without due process, and without giving them a meaningful opportunity to demonstrate they fear being persecuted, tortured, or killed if they are sent there.
Judge Brian Murphy, who issued that injunction, quickly issued an order today clarifying that “the allegedly imminent removals, as reported by news agencies and as plaintiffs seek to corroborate with class-member accounts and public information, would clearly violate this court’s order.”
The New York Times reported Tuesday that the Trump administration was planning to use a military plane to fly immigrants to Libya as early as today. When Trump was asked today whether he was planning to send immigrants to Libya, he replied, “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Homeland Security, please.”
Lawyers with the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, and Human Rights First submitted an emergency motion before Murphy today.
The lawyers warned that “Laotian, Vietnamese, and Philippine” immigrants, who are being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Texas, were “being prepared for removal to Libya, a county notorious for its human rights violations, especially with respect to migrant residents.” They said the immigrants had not received required notice or a chance to apply for protection under the Convention Against Torture.
“Libya has a long record of extreme human rights violations,” the lawyers wrote. “Any class member who is removed to Libya faces a strong likelihood of imprisonment followed by torture and even disappearance or death.”
Included as an exhibit was an email from an immigration lawyer at the Orange County Public Defender in California. It said: “What we’re hearing from relatives is that, yesterday, ICE officers at the South Texas Detention Facility gathered 1 Vietnamese detainee, along with 5 others (including 1 from Laos) into a room and told them that they needed to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya. When they all refused, they were each put in a separate room and cuffed in (basically, solitary) in order to get them to sign it.”
Another exhibit included emailed declarations from lawyers at the Asylum Defense Project. One lawyer wrote that a Laotian man at the South Texas ICE Processing Center “may be sent to Libya or Saudi Arabia imminently.” She went to meet with immigrants there, “but they have already been moved out,” her colleague wrote.
The Trump administration has already deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador without due process, despite a federal judge’s order not to, claiming that no one can force the administration to bring them back. Trump and his officials have prominently refused to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man whom it illegally deported to the Central American nation — even after the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 decision ordering it to “facilitate” his return.
El Salvador’s prison system is known for torture and abuses, and its judicial system is effectively a “black hole,” as Rolling Stone has reported. But shipping immigrants to Libya would be a new low.
The State Department’s 2023 annual report on human rights practices in Libya found, among other things, “credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment perpetrated by the government and armed groups on all sides; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; political prisoners or detainees; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative; serious abuses in a conflict, including reportedly widespread civilian deaths or harm.”
The report painted an even more dire picture for migrants and refugees.
“Migrants, refugees, and other foreign nationals were especially vulnerable to kidnapping,” the report said, adding that “such individuals remained vulnerable to seizure by armed groups engaged in human trafficking or migrant smuggling.”
Elsewhere, the report said: “An unknown number of individuals, including refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants, were held in facilities under the control of armed groups” including in “extralegal facilities run by smugglers and other nonstate actors.”
It continued: “The criminal and nonstate armed groups controlling extralegal facilities routinely tortured and abused detainees, subjecting them to arbitrary killings, rape and sexual violence, beatings, electric shocks, burns, forced labor, and deprivation of food and water, according to dozens of testimonies shared with international aid agencies and human rights groups. In many instances, the purpose of this abuse was reportedly to extort payments from detainees’ families.”
The New York Times reported today afternoon that Libya’s two rival governments both denied having agreed to any deal to accept deportations from the U.S.
