People being sent to countries where officials have not provided any “diplomatic assurances” that immigrants will be safe will be informed 24 hours in advance — and in “exigent” circumstances, just six. Those being flown to places that have offered those assurances could be deported with no advance notice.
If the State Department “believes those assurances to be credible,” then ICE may deport someone to that country “without the need for further procedures,” he wrote in the memo, obtained by The Washington Post.
The United States has rarely deported people to countries where they are not citizens, and lawyers warned that thousands of longtime immigrants with work permits and families in the U.S. could now be uprooted and sent to places where they lack family ties or even a common language.
Among those who could be targeted are thousands of immigrants with final removal orders who have not been deported to their native countries because a judge found that they might face danger there. Others are those with deportation orders to countries such as China or Cuba that do not always cooperate with deportations because of their frosty relationship to the U.S.
Immigrants who state a fear of being deported will be screened for possible protection, Lyons wrote, but immigration lawyers said the government’s plan does not give immigrants enough time to assess the danger they might face in a country that the government has selected for them.
“It puts thousands of lives at risk of persecution and torture,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, which is challenging the third-country removals on behalf of immigrants in an ongoing federal lawsuit filed in Massachusetts.
The alliance filed the lawsuit in March arguing that the U.S. government was violating federal law and sending immigrants to places where they could be harmed or killed, without giving them a chance to argue against it, including a Guatemalan man deported to Mexico, where he had been kidnapped and raped.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy barred the government from removing immigrants without giving them a “meaningful” opportunity to challenge it. On June 23, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority paused the judge’s decision in a brief, unsigned statement that did not explain its reasoning, but it cleared the way for the removals to resume.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote a stinging dissent with Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warned that the court’s decision would put people at risk. “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution,” she wrote. “In this case, the Government took the opposite approach.”
Since President Donald Trump took office promising mass deportations, officials have sent immigrants from Venezuela to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador, dispatched eight immigrants from Cuba, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Sudan and Mexico to a conflict zone in South Sudan, and illegally deported a Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego García, to El Salvador even though an immigration judge’s order forbade it. The Trump administration brought Abrego back to the U.S. last month after the Supreme Court ordered them to facilitate his return, but in recent days government lawyers have said they could deport Abrego to a third country instead.
