The U.S deports a dozen Asians to South Sudan
Recent reports indicate that, based on a court filing on Tuesday by a court in the United States, 12 South Asian migrants are to be deported to South Sudan. As a result, US immigration officers have begun enforcing the decree.
A U.S. court ruled on the deportation of 12 South Asian migrants to South Sudan, causing significant concern.
The deportations conflict with an earlier legal ruling protecting migrants' rights to adequate due process.
The presence of ongoing civil strife and human rights violations in South Sudan raises safety issues for deportees.
An email from a detention officer revealed that a Burmese national, simply referred to as "N.M.," was "removed...to South Sudan."
The move has been met with criticism as some lawyers contend that it goes against a previous ruling, relating to an emergency motion on May 7 following news of impending deportations to Saudi Arabia and Libya.
Immigration attorneys mentioned this in a petition they filed with the court, requesting that it intervene and return the migrants.
The emergency filing to the federal district court in Massachusetts mentioned that the move also violated an order granted by U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy, who prohibited the Trump administration from deporting migrants to third countries without providing them with essential due process rights.
Alongside 10 other migrants, a Vietnamese national identified as 'T.T.P.' seemed to have endured "the same fate" N.M did, as reported by France 24.
As reported by the media, immigration officers were looking to deport N.M. and others to Saudi Arabia and Libya.
The attorneys maintained that the deportation is a violation of an earlier order that they had made on the 7th of May.
The court had sided with plaintiffs, and "the men were ultimately 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.
A botched cease-fire in South Sudan fell apart last week, per the complaint, as the lawyers emphasized that the migrants were being flown "into a country that is now returning to full-blown and catastrophic civil war."
The attorneys relayed to a federal judge that any migrant sent to South Sudan "faces a strong likelihood of irreparable harm," considering accounts of pervasive war, brutality, and human rights abuses in the East African country.
The United States has not officially acknowledged an attempt to deport non-South Sudanese migrants to that nation. Representatives from the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to calls for comment.
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