How the Trump administration banished eight men to legal limbo in Africa

Somewhere inside Camp Lemonnier, a U.S. military base in the East African nation of Djibouti, eight men, all convicted of serious crimes in the United States, are under the guard of officers from the Department of Homeland Security.

The Trump administration had planned to send the men, who had come to the United States years ago as immigrants, on to the war-torn country of South Sudan, part of President Donald Trump’s broader plan for mass deportations. Then an order from a federal judge in Boston put a halt to the plan, at least for now.

And so for the past 16 days, the men have been in limbo. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have the detainees under “constant surveillance,” accompanying them to the bathroom and then searching them for contraband when they return, a DHS spokesperson said.

The detainees’ fate has emerged as a key test in the constitutional battle over the scope of due process. The White House is arguing that handing immigrants a one-page document is sufficient to deport them to a dangerous country to which they have no previous connection.

A reconstruction of the men’s journey from South Texas to Camp Lemonnier reveals a chaotic effort by the Trump administration to make an example of a group of immigrants the administration has termed “the worst of the worst.” At first, the detainees were told they were going to be sent to South Africa, but hours later were told it would be South Sudan instead.

The judge, Brian E. Murphy of the District of Massachusetts, found that DHS had given the men less than 24 hours’ notice before they were deported, in violation of a court order that migrants in their position be given a “meaningful opportunity” to voice a reasonable fear of torture.

To piece together the men’s story, The New York Times reviewed court and criminal records, and spoke with lawyers, officials and family members, as well as one detainee, still in custody, who was part of the group until officers pulled him aside before the plane departed. The Times also spoke with government officials with knowledge of the deportations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation.

A DHS spokesperson emphasized the seriousness of the detainees’ crimes. She said Murphy’s order that the eight men should remain in U.S. custody was to blame for the operation’s logistical challenges.

For now, no one knows how long the men will be held in Djibouti or where they might be sent next.

Ngoc Phan, the wife of one of the detainees, said she and her husband had already planned to return to Vietnam, his native country, this year.

A U.S. citizen, she acknowledged that her husband, Tuan Thanh Phan, who came to the United States from Vietnam at age 9, killed someone in a gang altercation when he was 18, leading to a 25-year prison sentence and an order from an immigration court to leave the United States. But he had completed his sentence, she said, and was now resigned to returning to the country of his birth.

Instead, the government’s attempt to send him to a country on the brink of civil war had landed him on a U.S. military base, “loaded onto a plane in the middle of the night to be disappeared somewhere,” she said.

The journey that took the men to Camp Lemmonier began May 17, when 10 men arrived at the ICE detention center in Port Isabel, Texas.

Court documents show that U.S. courts had convicted all the men of violent crimes; many had either finished or were about to finish serving their sentences. Ahmer Shaikh, 57, a native of Pakistan and one of the detainees, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for second-degree murder for his role in a fatal assault on a Virginia man.

They also had “orders of removal,” meaning the government had the legal authority to deport them.

At Port Isabel, Shaikh said in a phone interview, the men believed they were being sent back to their home countries. Then, on May 19, three officers handed the men papers for them to sign and therefore acknowledge they had been notified of their pending deportation — to South Africa.

Each member of the group refused to sign, Shaikh said, and the men were sent back to their quarters.

With that, the men became part of a lawsuit pending before Murphy, who had issued an order that required the government to give “written notice” to any migrant facing deportation to a third country. They would then have a chance to voice a “reasonable fear” of torture. Then, if the government found that they had failed to demonstrate such a fear, they would have “a minimum of 15 days” to challenge the legality of their deportations in court.

But the actual process unfolded much faster.

“Guys, I’ve got good news for you and bad news for you,” an officer told the men that evening, according to Shaikh. “The good news is we are not going to deport you guys to South Africa. But we are going to deport you guys to South Sudan.”

The next morning, May 20, Shaikh said, the men were loaded into a van and given new paperwork stating they were being transferred to another immigration facility, in Louisiana. Instead, he said, they were driven to an airport.

Waiting on the tarmac was a Gulfstream V owned by a charter company, according to public flight-tracking data the Times was able to confirm using satellite imagery.

At that moment, Shaikh said, the men realized something was amiss.

“We all look in each other’s faces; we just look at each other,” he said. “Our faces just turned pale.”

As the others boarded the plane, Shaikh said, he and another man, an immigrant from South Korea, were pulled aside with no explanation.

“To this day, it’s a mystery,” he said. “Why? Why the two of us pulled out of that plane?”

Before leaving Port Isabel, Phan had managed to call his wife. She alerted lawyers, who filed an emergency motion for the judge to intervene. On the evening of May 20, Murphy called a hearing to figure out what had become of the men.

“Where is the plane?” Murphy repeatedly asked government lawyers.

“I’m told that that information is classified, and I am told that the final destination is also classified,” replied Elianis N. Perez, a Justice Department lawyer.

By that time, the plane had left U.S. airspace, according to a public flight-tracking website.

At the hearing, Murphy struggled to get information from the government about the rapidly evolving situation. Three times, he called a recess so Justice Department lawyers could try to get more information on the detainees’ whereabouts.

Finally, Murphy said he would not order the plane to turn around but ordered the parties to reconvene the following morning, May 21.

A little more than an hour after the plane landed at Camp Lemonnier, Murphy took the bench in Boston and announced that he believed the government had violated his order by giving the detainees so little notice before trying to deport them to South Sudan.

“It was impossible for these people to have a meaningful opportunity to object to their transfer to South Sudan,” he said.

At first, the government declined to disclose to Murphy where the detainees had ended up.

“They’re sitting on a plane,” a DHS official told the judge, explaining that their whereabouts were deemed too sensitive to discuss in open court.

The next day, in a social media post, Trump announced that “EIGHT of the most violent criminals on Earth remain in Djibouti.”

At a hearing, Murphy told the government it could either fly the detainees back to the United States or figure out a way to set up interviews in Djibouti where the men would be given the chance to object to their deportations. Either way, he ordered that they remain in U.S. custody and be given access to a phone so they could contact their lawyers.

On Monday, DHS said in a court filing that it had set up an interview room where the detainees could meet remotely with their lawyers, and had provided them access to a satellite phone. But on Thursday afternoon, a lawyer for the men said her team had not yet heard from them.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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