US blocked from deporting undocumented immigrants from Asia

Some immigrants from Asia have already been deported to Central American countries.

Immigrants from Asia were saved from being deported to Libya by a federal judge eaerlier this week. They were on the tarmac in Texas  waiting for the flight to Libya when they received the judge's order.

US District Judge Briaan Murphy on May 7 said the deportation of the noncitizen immigrants from the Philippines, Vietnam and Laos would violate his earlier ruling that people have the right to challenge their removal by US authorities.

Tin Thanh Nguyen, told the news agency Reuters that his client, a Vietnamese construction worker from Los Angeles, was among the immigrants woken in the early morning hours and bussed from an immigration detention center in Pearsall, Texas, to an airfield where a military aircraft awaited them.

After several hours, they were bussed back to the detention center around noon, the attorney said on Thursday.

Murphy's ruling was in response to an emergency motion by the Asian immigrants' lawyers who claimed their clients were in "imminent" danger of being deported to Libya -- "a country notorious for its human rights violations."

Sending the would-be deportees to Libya or Saudi Arabia without giving them a chance to raise concerns about their safety "blatantly defies this Court's preliminary injunctions," lawyers representing the migrants argued in an emergency motion filed in federal court in Boston, where Murphy last month issued a preliminary injunction barring the Trump administration from deporting noncitizens to any country other than their place of origin without due process.

“The allegedly imminent removals, as reported by news agencies,” the judge said, “would clearly violate this Court’s Order.”

“The Department of Homeland Security may not evade this injunction by ceding control over non-citizens or the enforcement of its immigration responsibilities to any other agency, including but not limited to the Department of Defence,” Murphy added.

Since the illegal deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador, US judges have blocked further deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was last used to incarcerate Japanese American citizens during World War II.

Libya, meanwhile, denied that it has agreed to received deportees from the United States. Libya has been locked in a civil war since strongman Omar Ghadafi was killed 11 years ago.

The Libyan government, "categorically denies the existence of any agreement or coordination with it regarding the reception of any migrants deported from the United States,” the party in power said.

The plan to deport would-be deportees to Libya was first reported by Reuters. 

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week hinted that Washington was looking to expand the number of countries where it may deport people beyond El Salvador.

“The further away from America, the better,” Rubio said at a cabinet meeting at the White House last Wednesday.

Abuses against detained migrants in in Libya have been widely documented, with UN investigators saying they had evidence of possible crimes against humanity, including accounts of murder, torture, enslavement, extrajudicial killings and rape.

The Trump administration had deported 152,000 people as of May 5, according to Department of Homeland Security.

Dawn raids and the threat of being arrested at work , school or during a regularly scheduled check-in with ICE, have spread fear and uncertainty among people across the US, including more than 1.3 million people from Asia, amid Trump's crackdown against immigrants without documentatin.

Nguyen said his client, whose name he wouldn't reveal, said his client was told: ‘We’re deporting you to Libya,’ even though he hadn’t signed the form, he didn’t know what the form was,” according to Reuters.

Nguyen told the news agency his client, originally from Vietnam, has lived in the US since the 1990s but was complying with the law by checking wi with the government when he was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) earlier this year.

"Many people are now afraid to go to work, visit their places of worship, attend school, or even seek medical care out of fear of encountering immigration enforcement," said Martin Kim, immigration advocacy director for the Washington-based civil rights group Asian Americans Advancing Justice — AAJC.

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