By Matik Kueth
The United States (U.S) immigration officials have deported about 12 South Asian migrants to South Sudan, according to a Tuesday court filing and media reports.
Immigration lawyers learnt from a detention officer’s email that a Burmese national, designated as “N.M.”, was “removed…to South Sudan,” they stated in a filing requesting judicial intervention and the migrants’ release.
The second migrant, a Vietnamese national known as T.T.P. in the filing, “appears to have suffered the same fate” as at least ten others.
The expulsion breaches an earlier order, according to the lawyers, who last filed an emergency motion on May 7, following media reports that immigration officials were about to deport N.M. and others to Libya and Saudi Arabia.
The court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and “the men were eventually transported back to an immigration detention center after remaining on a bus on the base’s tarmac for three or four hours,” the filing said.
The filing also stated that a defective peace accord in South Sudan broke this week, and N.M. is being flown “into a country that is now returning to full-blown and catastrophic civil war”.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
In early April, the Trump administration banned visas for South Sudanese nationals as part of President Donald Trump’s ever-expanding anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Also, in late April, the South Sudanese government apologized to the American government for the diplomatic row that occurred when the former refused to accept a Congolese deportee from the United States, and it promised to expedite the deportation of its impacted nationals back to South Sudan.
On April 6, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that visas for South Sudanese passport holders would be revoked since the country’s transitional administration refused to admit nationals expelled from the United States.
However, on April 8, South Sudan’s Foreign Ministry stated that upon arrival, it was discovered that the individual who presented a South Sudanese travel document under the name Nimeri Garang is a Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) national whose real name is Makula Kintu, and that he was returned to the sending country (the United States).
Under pressure, South Sudan reversed its decision not to allow Kintu entry, and he returned to Juba on April 9, after the United States withdrew visas for South Sudanese passport holders.
Trump had said the United States faces an “invasion” by “foreign criminals”.
In February, Trump utilized rarely used wartime legislation to fly 250 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador without court hearings, claiming they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which their families and lawyers refute.