By
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are laboring under dangerous conditions while maintaining custody over migrants they’re holding at a military base in Djibouti, according to a declaration from an ICE official Thursday. But the Trump administration is choosing to keep them there, so if the government’s top priority is caring for its workers, it could move them elsewhere while the legal process plays out.
The government had sought to deport a group of migrants to war-torn South Sudan, but U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy told the government to give them a chance to properly challenge their removals. The judge didn’t say that they had to stay in Djibouti while their claims are processed; he just said the government had to maintain custody and control over them. The government could bring them back to the U.S. to continue the process here if that’s what the government preferred.
To underscore that the status quo is due at least partly to the government’s preference, Murphy emphasized in a recent ruling that, even though he found the government had violated a prior order in attempting the premature deportations, he didn’t grant the migrants’ request to be returned to the U.S. “Instead, the Court accepted [the government] Defendants’ own suggestion that they be allowed to keep the individuals out of the country and finish their process abroad,” he wrote, using italics to press the point.
The Biden appointee in Boston had told the government, while ordering officials to maintain custody and control of the migrants, that while he “leaves the practicalities of compliance to [government] Defendants’ discretion, Defendants have ensured, and the Court expects, that class members will be treated humanely.”
Thursday’s ICE declaration filed to Murphy suggests that it’s ICE officers themselves who are facing inhumane conditions. It says they’re showing symptoms of respiratory infections but can’t get proper testing for diagnoses, and that they’re at risk of rocket attacks from Yemeni terrorists but lack body armor or other protective gear. A Trump official said Thursday that the judge was “literally putting ICE agents’ lives in danger.”
But that’s not quite true. The judge never said they had to stay there. As Murphy put it in his recent ruling, officials are “manufacturing the very chaos they decry.”
Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.