Supreme Court Clears Third-Country Deportations to South Sudan Without Due Process

The Supreme Court issued a clarification to its pause of an order by federal District Court Judge Brian Murphy that required the federal government to provide due process in the form of notice and an opportunity to raise fear-based objections to their destination before third-country deportation of eight immigrants to violent unstable South Sudan.

The Supreme Court gave a green light to the government to go ahead with the deportations without due process.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor wrote that the court was choosing to let the government seek “unlawful ends” and putting the immigrants at risk to do so. “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.”

The immigrants involved are from Latin America and Asia, have criminal records in the USA, and have been stranded in Djibouti for weeks in deplorable conditions because that is what the government chose when Murphy asked how the government wanted to provide due process. The government decided to do it in Djibouti and flew their aircraft back to the USA empty.

The immigrants and their federal guards have all been ill, breathing smog from burn pits every evening, stuck in make-do quarters in temperatures about 100F, exposed to malaria and rocket attacks. The government has yet to figure out how to conduct reasonable-fear interviews there.

Click here for more details.

Click here to read the ruling.