US President Donald Trump, center, is joined by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., left, as he departs the Capitol following a meeting with the House Republican Conference. AP
Up to a dozen people from several countries may have been deported to Africa, immigration rights lawyers told a judge.
An immigration official in Texas confirmed via email that at least one man from Myanmar had been flown to South Sudan Tuesday morning, according to court documents.
A woman also reported to attorneys that her husband from Vietnam and up to 10 other people were flown to Africa.
Those removals would violate a court order from a judge in Massachusetts requiring that people have a chance to challenge removals to countries other than their homelands, attorneys from the National Immigration Litigation Alliance wrote.
They asked Judge Brian E. Murphy for an emergency order to prevent such removals. He previously said deportations to Libya would violate his ruling.
As part of the Trump administration’s push to carry out mass deportations, the agency responsible for immigration enforcement has aggressively revived and expanded a decades-old program that delegates immigration enforcement powers to state and local law enforcement agencies.
Under the 287(g) program led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, police officers can interrogate immigrants in their custody and detain them for potential deportation.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, ICE has rapidly expanded the number of signed agreements it has with law enforcement agencies across the country.
The reason is clear. Those agreements vastly beef up the number of immigration enforcement staff available to ICE, which has about 6,000 deportation officers, as they aim to meet Trump’s goal of deporting as many of the roughly 11 million people in the country illegally as they can.
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