ICE Said They Were Being Flown to Louisiana. Their Flight Landed in Africa

When eight men in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement boarded a plane in May, officials told them that they were being sent on a short trip from Texas to another ICE facility in Louisiana.

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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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, Pakistan, South Korea, 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 U.N. warning about the potential for full-scale civil war. South Sudan is also under a U.S. 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.

A relative of one of the deportees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect himself and his family member, said the men were bombarded with contradictory information. His family member, now in South Sudan, said the men were told they would be sent to Africa but received conflicting details. “I do not think they gave him enough information about what was going on,” he told The Intercept.

Court documents and emails examined by The Intercept show that one of the eight men, Nyo Myint, an immigrant from Myanmar referred to in the documents as “N.M.” — who has limited proficiency in English — was served a “notice of removal” which said that ICE intended to deport him from a detention center in Port Isabel, Texas, to South Africa, not South Sudan. The certificate shows that the notice was read to Myint in English, without an interpreter, at 10:59 a.m. on May 19 and that Myint refused to sign the document. 

Ngoc Phan, the wife of Tuan Thanh Phan, who hails from Vietnam, offered a similar account from contemporaneous conversations with her husband. Ngoc spoke with Tuan by telephone while he, Myint, and others were facing deportation, and she offered a narrative that corroborated the legal documents and accounts by lawyers who spoke with The Intercept.

“Everyone protested because no one from that group was from South Africa. They said, ‘We don’t know anybody there. We’re not from there. We don’t want to go there.’ And no one signed the paperwork that the officers gave them,” said Ngoc, relaying what Tuan told her on May 19.

Tuan Phan and Ahmer Shaikh — another ICE prisoner ultimately separated from the group who spoke to the New York Times — offered nearly identical accounts. Both said that everyone refused to sign the forms. An ICE agent told them something to the effect of, “I’ve got good news for you and bad news for you. The good news is we are not going to deport you to South Africa. The bad news is we are going to deport you guys to South Sudan.” Ngoc Phan told The Intercept that Tuan replied, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me there. I don’t want to go there.”

Documents show that at 5:48 p.m. on May 19, Myint was served another removal notice, which he also refused to sign, that said ICE intended to send him to South Sudan.

Lawyers for Tuan Phan and another of the men, Cuban national Jose Rodriguez, told The Intercept that, following the men’s protests against being sent to Africa, ICE seemingly relented and told them that they would be transferred to another detention facility within the United States. Ngoc Phan said the same.

“The U.S. government deceived these men up to the very last minute,” Ngoc told The Intercept. “Around three or four in the morning on Tuesday the 20th, they gathered this group up, which included my husband. They said ‘We’re going to transfer all of you guys to a detention center in Oakdale, Louisiana, instead.’”

ICE does not have a publicly listed detention center in Oakdale, Louisiana, though the federal prison complex in the town was formerly listed as an ICE facility, and an immigration court still operates on the premises. When ICE announced that Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old citizen of Haiti, had died in ICE custody in Florida this spring, the agency wrote that she was previously held at “Richwood Correctional Center in Oakdale, Louisiana,” though that facility is located in Monroe, two hours away.

Aldana Madrid, of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said that her client told her that he was even given a form to sign. “He said that the men were told about, and they were actually given a piece of paper to sign for, the transfer. Tuan said, ‘I saw the paper and it said Oakdale, Louisiana,’ so I signed it. But he says they were not given a copy of it.”

Aldana Madrid explained that after the men left the Texas facility, the deception continued, according to Tuan: “They were told, ‘Oh, it takes about 10 hours to drive there, but if we fly, it’s faster. So we’re flying.’” But it wasn’t until they were on the plane for more than 45 minutes that Tuan recalls having heard them say something about being sent somewhere else, said Aldana Madrid. A few hours later, the men were told that they would be landing in Ireland to refuel. “Then they were like, ‘Wait, where are we going?’ And they were told Djibouti. Tuan asked, ‘Djibouti, where’s that?’ And ICE was like, ‘In Africa.’ But 45 minutes into the flight, they still thought they were going to Louisiana,” said Aldana Madrid.

Matthew Archambeault, who represents Rodriguez, said his client offered a near-identical account.

“They were given a piece of paper that said they were going to South Africa. According to my client, everyone said, ‘Fuck that! We’re not signing.’ And then they went to their cells,” Archambeault told The Intercept. “He said that maybe two hours later, they called them back and told them, ‘Hey we have good news and bad news. The good news is you’re not going to South Africa. The bad news is you’re going to South Sudan.” 

Later, said Archambeault, the men were told: “‘We’re gonna fly you to Oakdale.’” When they were boarding the plane, one of the men apparently voiced concerns that the charter jet was an unlikely choice for the short flight from Texas to Louisiana. Rodriguez told Archambeault that the men eventually realized they had been airborne too long to be heading to Louisiana. When they landed in Ireland to refuel, they knew for certain they had been expelled from the United States.

A third member of the group was also told by an ICE official he would be sent to Louisiana, according to his lawyer who spoke on the condition that neither of their identities would be revealed to protect their privacy. “I can confirm that directly prior to being removed, my client was told that the men were being sent to Louisiana,” the attorney told The Intercept by email.

Experts said that the type of deception perpetrated by ICE was nothing new, that the government frequently failed to act in good faith, and that agents regularly deceived immigrants in the course of their work. Trina Realmuto, a lawyer for the immigrants expelled to South Sudan and executive director at the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said the deception was far from exceptional. “We constantly hear about DHS officers lying to noncitizens about what is happening in their cases and where they are going, or telling them to sign papers based on wrong information,” she told The Intercept. “This has been happening for years.”

The Trump administration deported the men to South Sudan as part of a globe-spanning effort to expel immigrants to so-called third countries in cases where U.S. law bars them from being sent to their home countries, when their home countries will not accept them, or seemingly, as a punitive measure and a means to frighten other immigrants or potential immigrants with the possibility of being expelled to dangerous nations.

Last month, McLaughlin, the ICE spokesperson, claimed that ICE was unable to deport the eight men to their home countries. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that the U.S. government did not inform her government that Mexican national Jesus Munoz Gutierrez was sent to Djibouti. She also did not oppose his repatriation to Mexico.

Experts say that these recent efforts to expel Mexicans to crisis zones like Libya and now South Sudan demonstrate the casual cruelty of the Trump administration.

“I’ve been doing immigration detention work for a very long time. I’ve never in my life seen Mexico refuse to take back one of its nationals, ever,” Anwen Hughes, the senior director of legal strategy for refugee programs at Human Rights First, told The Intercept last month. The Port Isabel detention center, where the men were held before being flown to Africa, is less than 30 miles from the Mexican border. “The U.S. appears to be looking for really implausible destinations to send people. It’s not just punitive, it’s deliberately terrifying and honestly perverse,” said Hughes.

The Trump administration has been employing strong-arm tactics with dozens of smaller, weaker, and economically dependent nations to create a global network of deportee dumping grounds. The administration has explored deals with more than a quarter of the world’s nations to accept so-called third-country nationals — deported persons who are not their citizens.

The negotiations are being conducted in secret, and neither the State Department nor ICE will discuss them. With the green light from the Supreme Court, thousands of immigrants are in danger of being disappeared into this global gulag.

“Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent last month. “That use of discretion is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.”