A federal judge said on Saturday that it appeared the Trump administration was making “an end run around” US court orders prohibiting the deportation of five African immigrants to their home countries by first sending them to Ghana, which was then preparing to relocate them to countries where they could face torture or death.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan directed the government to explain Saturday night how it was attempting to ensure Ghana did not send the immigrants elsewhere in violation of domestic court orders. According to Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the plaintiffs has already been shipped from Ghana to his home country of Gambia, where a US court ruled he could not be sent.
The case is the latest legal challenge to the Trump administration’s practice of deporting people to countries other than their own, including El Salvador, Panama, Costa Rica, and several African countries, as President Donald Trump has aggressively cracked down on undocumented migrants.
Elianis Perez of the Department of Justice admitted that she told Chutkan in court on Friday that Ghana had promised that would not happen. However, she claimed that Chutkan had no authority to control how another country treated deportees. She pointed out that the US Supreme Court ruled this summer that the administration could continue sending immigrants to countries from which they did not originate, even if they had not raised concerns about torture.
Gelernt, on the other hand, compared the case to that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration mistakenly deported to El Salvador despite a court order prohibiting it, and then claimed he couldn’t be repatriated. After multiple courts ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return, Abrego Garcia eventually returned to the United States, where he is currently fighting human trafficking charges and another Trump deportation attempt.
“This appears to be a specific plan to make an end run around these obligations,” Chutkan said of the administration’s decision to send the immigrants to Ghana. “What is the government planning to do? And please don’t tell me you don’t have any control over Ghana; I already know that.”
Chutkan later issued an order giving the administration until 9 p.m. ET to file a declaration outlining how it was attempting to ensure that other immigrants were not improperly returned to their home countries from Ghana.
