By Nick Turse

Many hours later, the plane landed in Djibouti. The men were held in shipping containers for weeks, shackles on their legs. This past weekend, they were expelled to the violence-plagued nation of South Sudan.
This deception, revealed by an Intercept investigation, highlights the lengths to which the US government will go to further its anti-immigrant agenda and deport people to so-called third countries to which they have no connections.
Lawyers for three of the men said that their clients were told, after resisting deportation to Africa, that they were instead being transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana. ICE then hustled them onto a plane, in the wee hours of the morning, and flew them out of the country without their knowledge or consent.
This account was further corroborated by the wife of one of those same men who was told about ICE’s tactics in real time. “This underscores just how abysmal and reprehensible the government’s treatment of these men has been from the very beginning, and the fact that the government made no genuine attempt to comply with the district court injunction in place prior to shipping them out of the United States,” said Glenda Aldana Madrid, a staff attorney at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project who is representing one of the men, Tuan Thanh Phan.
Aldana Madrid added, “Tuan and the other men had the right to know where they were going, and yet the government did not have the basic decency to do even that before putting them on a plane bound for a country none of them knew, and that is on the brink of civil war.”
The Intercept sent numerous requests to ICE for comment. Spokesperson Miguel Alvarez acknowledged receipt of the questions but did not reply.
While the men were in transit in May, a federal judge intervened. Citing a prior nationwide injunction requiring the administration to give deportees advance notice of their destination and a “meaningful” chance to object if they believed they’d be in danger of harm, the eight men were not flown directly to South Sudan. They were instead imprisoned for weeks at a US military base, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, shackled at the feet in a converted shipping container.
The men had been convicted of violent crimes, many had served lengthy prison sentences, and had “orders of removal,” meaning the government had the legal authority to deport them. But most of the men -who hail from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, and Vietnam- have no ties to South Sudan. An eighth man is South Sudanese but left Africa when he was a baby, before the nation of South Sudan even existed.
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that the expulsion to South Sudan could go forward, the latest in a recent spate of decisions that have paved the way for the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime -and have restricted immigrants’ rights to object on the grounds that they might be abused or face death.
“The United States may not deport noncitizens to a country where they are likely to be tortured or killed. International and domestic law guarantee that basic human right,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a bitter dissent to the Thursday decision. “In this case, the Government seeks to nullify it by deporting noncitizens to potentially dangerous countries without notice or the opportunity to assert a fear of torture.”
More than a decade of intermittent political turmoil and outright civil war has left South Sudan politically unstable and ravaged by violence. Recent clashes between armed groups drove more than 165,000 people to flee their homes in three months, according to a June United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report.
The country is subject to a UN warning about the potential for full-scale civil war. South Sudan is also under a US State Department “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory and the department advises those who choose to go there to draft a will, establish a proof of life protocol with family members, and leave DNA samples with one’s medical provider.
“After weeks of delays by activist judges that put our law enforcement in danger, ICE deported these 8 barbaric criminals [sic] illegal aliens to South Sudan,” Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Intercept in an email after the Trump administration succeeded in deporting the eight men to South Sudan on Saturday.
Interviews with family members and lawyers of the eight deportees, as well as contemporaneous documents, provide insights into the confusion and deception sowed by ICE before the immigrants were expelled to Africa.