U.S. competes deportation of 8 felon migrants to South Sudan

Homeland Security said Saturday that it has finally deported eight illegal immigrants — all of them with serious criminal records — to South Sudan, moving to complete the removals after the Supreme Court gave permission.

The eight migrants had been stuck living in a shipping container converted to a holding cell at a U.S. military base in Djibouti while their fate played out in U.S. courtrooms.

But the Supreme Court on Thursday issued a ruling lifting a lower court’s blockade on carrying out their deportations, giving Homeland Security the space to finally drop them in one of the world’s most dangerous nations.

“These sickos were finally deported to South Sudan on Independence Day,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.

The migrants are Jose Manuel Rodriguez-Quinones, a Cuban convicted of attempted murder; Enrique Arias-Hierro, a Cuban convicted of homicide and kidnapping; Thongxay Nilakout, a Laotian convicted of murder; Jesus Munoz-Gutierrez, a Mexican convicted of murder; Dian Peter Domach, a South Sudan citizen convicted of robbery; Kyaw Mya, a Burmese citizen convicted of a sex crime against a child less than 12 years of age; Nyo Myint, another Burmese citizen convicted of sexual assault against a mentally infirm person; and Tuan Thanh Phan, a Vietnamese citizen convicted of murder.

The U.S. said that, for most of them, their home countries refused to take them back, violating an international norm.

Under American law, the government can then search for a third country willing to take them.

It found that option in South Sudan.

A Biden appointee, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, stepped in and said third-country deportations deserved more “due process” to be able to challenge being sent to another nation.

As the U.S. tried to send the eight migrants to South Sudan the judge stepped and ordered it not to land and release them until they’d had more due process.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement built the makeshift detention facility at the military base and was trying to figure out how to give the men more hearings as the legal battle raged in the U.S.

The Supreme Court last month put a hold on Judge Murphy’s due process ruling, but he then said that didn’t apply to the South Sudan migrants. The justices on Thursday said he was wrong.

“Our June 23 order stayed the April 18 preliminary injunction in full. The May 21 remedial order cannot now be used to enforce an injunction that our stay rendered unenforceable,” the justices said in an unsigned order.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting, said the court consigned the migrants to a terrible fate.

“What the government wants to do, concretely, is send the eight noncitizens it illegally removed from the United States from Djibouti to South Sudan, where they will be turned over to the local authorities without regard for the likelihood that they will face torture or death,” she said.