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A federal judge has placed a hold on the U.S. government’s plans to deport a number of immigrants to Libya, following allegations from immigrants, their families and their lawyers that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials told them they would soon be sent to that country.
The injunction placed by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy states that the Trump administration’s actions would “clearly violate” a previous order he made, violating immigrants’ right to challenge their expulsion to countries other than their homelands.
Murphy also ordered that the U.S. government — which hasn’t formally acknowledged whether or not it is planning to deport people to Libya — hand over any details relating to claims that they are planning such a move, if such details exist.
The immigrants in question are reportedly from the Philippines, Vietnam and Laos, among other countries, according to a report from NBC News. In the legal motion seeking the injunction, lawyers claimed that their clients are being targeted for deportation “without any reasonable fear screening, let alone a fifteen-day window to file a motion to reopen with the immigration court to contest any negative reasonable fear determination.”
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said that she “can’t confirm” previous reports that immigrants living in the U.S. could soon be deported to Libya. But State Department Secretary Marco Rubio confirmed last month that the Trump administration is “actively searching for other countries to take people,” beyond the White House’s current agreement with El Salvador.
Libyan government officials have denied the existence of an agreement with the U.S. to receive and detain immigrants in their prisons. But they have also acknowledged that “some parallel parties that are not subject to legitimacy” could be involved in receiving and imprisoning immigrants.
Immigrants who have been abducted by ICE told their families and their lawyers that they were being threatened with deportation to Libya, which has a history of human rights abuses, particularly against immigrants. Those individuals said that immigration officials tried to force them to sign documents agreeing to be deported to the country; if they refused to do so, they were cuffed and placed in what was essentially solitary confinement.
Human rights groups have repeatedly shined a light on the deplorable conditions of Libya’s immigrant prisons.
In 2021, Amnesty International described those sites as “horrific” and a “hellscape,” finding evidence of “sexual violence, against men, women and children.” The Global Detention Project also stated that immigrants in those detention centers were subjected to “physical mistreatment and tortured” and forced into slavery.
The United Nations Human Rights Council’s Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya issued a report in 2023 concluding that the country likely committed “crimes against humanity” against “Libyans and migrants throughout Libya,” documenting examples of “arbitrary detention, murder, torture, rape, enslavement, sexual slavery, extrajudicial killing and enforced disappearance.” And even the U.S. State Department’s own assessments on Libya describe conditions in its detention centers as “harsh and life-threatening.”
“I have been in those migrant prisons and it’s no place for migrants. It’s just a horrific place to dump any vulnerable person,” said Frederic Wehrey, a Libya expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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