Trump blocked from deporting migrants to countries where they’re not citizens

A federal judge in Boston issued a temporary emergency order blocking the Trump administration from sending anyone with a final deportation order to a country where they are not a citizen without first giving them a “meaningful opportunity” to seek humanitarian protection in the United States.

As the Trump administration struggles to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history, the decision from U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy on Friday marks the third time in less than two weeks that a court has blocked or slowed those efforts. It follows threats from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem this week that anyone in the United States illegally could be swept away to El Salvador and imprisoned in one of the nation’s sprawling prisons.

In a two-page decision following a hearing, Murphy wrote that officials may not deport someone to a so-called third country “unless and until” they provide the deportee and their lawyer written notice of the country to which they are being sent. Then, the judge said, officials must let them apply in immigration court for protection to stay in the U.S. under the Convention Against Torture, which Congress ratified in 1994 to prohibit the government from sending immigrants to a country where they might be tortured.

After that, the judge said, the agency must await a final decision from an immigration judge before sending someone to another country.

Advocates for immigrants celebrated the decision as potentially lifesaving given, that the Trump administration has been intensely pressuring immigration officers to arrest a wide array of immigrants and expedite deportations, even if it means bypassing long-standing procedures to do so. Before taking office, administration officials said immigrants would have their day in court. But they are increasingly attempting to remove people without hearings or to countries that were not the original destinations listed on their deportation orders.

“I feel relieved for our plaintiffs and individuals with final orders,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, one of the organizations that filed the lawsuit on Sunday.

“Our organizations have been inundated with calls and emails from attorneys and family members who are terrified that their clients or loved ones could be picked up and whisked away without an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, I’m afraid to be deported to this country. Please let me apply for protection,’” said Realmuto, the lawyer who argued the case in Boston on Friday, in an interview after the hearing.

Protection under the Convention Against Torture can be difficult to obtain and requires that applicants meet a higher standard of proof than in ordinary asylum cases, meaning that it is “more likely than not” that they would face harm, according to documents on the immigration court website.

While applicants could be removed to countries where they are not citizens, the process outlined in Murphy’s decision could slow their removal and ensure that they have a full hearing and potentially have access to legal advice at their own expense. About 3.7 million cases are pending in the backlogged immigration courts, and cases often take months or years to resolve.

Lawyers and advocates for immigrants have long pointed out that it is a violation of federal and international law to send someone to a country where they could be tortured, even if they are serious offenders. An immigration judge acknowledged this process in a 2016 article, writing that although such offenders are “the least sympathetic of those who appear before us. Drug traffickers. Sex offenders. Thieves,” they cannot be removed if they would face torture. He wrote that such cases, in his court, were rare.

“To our nation’s great moral credit, we don’t send people to places where they will be tortured – no matter how repugnant their crimes,” the judge, now retired, wrote in 2016.

Murphy’s decision does not affect alleged gang members deported this month under the Alien Enemies Act without a hearing, but it could protect other immigrants who are at risk of being removed to El Salvador or other countries under regular deportation proceedings.

Officials said 137 of the 261 deportees sent to El Salvador on March 15 were suspected gang members removed under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime authority.

But an additional 101 Venezuelans were removed under regular immigration laws. Going forward, they and others would be protected from quickly being moved to a third country without warning or a chance to plead their cases.

In the complaint filed Sunday, lawyers said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Feb. 19 deported a Guatemalan man without warning to Mexico, where the man said in court filings that he had been raped. An immigration judge had granted the man protection from being removed to Guatemala. But the man said he did not have a chance to express his fear of also returning to Mexico. He ended up back in Guatemala, the country he originally fled, and remains in hiding, the lawsuit said.

The Justice Department immediately appealed the ruling Friday. The White House, Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department had no additional comment.

Officials have criticized a federal judge’s ruling this month blocking them from carrying out deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. After President Donald Trump secretly signed a proclamation to activate the act, administration officials and El Salvador’s president celebrated the arrival of the deportees in the Central American country, sharing a video of shackled deportees being hauled off planes, forced to their knees and their heads shaved while surrounded by heavily armed police and military.

The display shocked advocates and relatives, who said some had no criminal records and feared for their safety inside prisons devoted to detaining alleged terrorists and gang members.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg blocked the removals under the act, fearing for the migrants’ safety, but the Trump administration still got three planeloads of people out of the country and into El Salvador.

A three-judge appeals court upheld his ruling Tuesday, days after a hearing in which one judge remarked that “Nazis got better treatment” when they were subject to deportation proceedings under the Alien Enemies Act during World War II, the most recent time the act was previously invoked.

On Friday, the White House said it had appealed the Alien Enemies Act case to the Supreme Court.