Trump’s Deportation Plans to Libya Involve Some Chilling Threats

The Trump administration’s plan to deport immigrants to Libya was even more extensive and disturbing than initial reports suggested.

Under the plan, nationals from countries including Cambodia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and even Mexico were to be sent to the north African country still recovering from a civil war. According to court filings from immigration rights advocates, who filed an emergency request in Boston federal court to halt the deportations, ICE gathered one Vietnamese national, one Laotian, and four other detainees and demanded they sign paperwork agreeing to be sent to Libya.

When all six refused, they were handcuffed and placed into solitary confinement. Later on Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy ruled that any deportations to Libya of third-country nationals without the opportunity to object over torture concerns “would violate this Court’s Order.”

Libya’s two rival governments each denied on Wednesday that they had agreed to accept deported immigrants from the U.S. When asked about the plan Wednesday, Trump himself said, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the Department of Homeland Security.”

The idea that immigrants in the U.S. could be deported to a country like Libya, where “open slave markets” exist and where immigrants are detained in conditions described as a “hellscape” by Amnesty International, is shocking in itself. Even more shocking is that neither of the two entities who control Libya even agreed to accepting any immigrants from the U.S.

But the Trump administration has already taken an unprecedented step in sending immigrants to countries to which they have no connection, such as El Salvador and Rwanda. While a court order appears to have at least put a temporary brake on deportations to Libya, the White House will probably keep trying to skirt the law in trying to expel as many immigrants as possible.