US President Donald Trump.
Credit: Reuters
Washington: Lawyers for five migrants deported to Ghana last week accused the Trump administration Friday of ignoring court-ordered protections for their clients, the latest legal challenge to a campaign that has been carried out with remarkable speed and a lack of transparency.
In an interview Friday evening, the lawyers said the case bore similarities to that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to his home country of El Salvador this year and who continues to fight a labyrinthine legal battle as the administration tries to deport him to various African countries. As in his case, the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, raised the question of whether the administration had defied judges’ orders protecting the migrants.
The Trump administration has brokered deals with several African nations, Rwanda, Uganda, Eswatini and — most recently — Ghana, to accept deported migrants, many of whom have no connection to those countries. Administration officials, under pressure from President Donald Trump to carry out his promised mass deportation operation, have moved swiftly on these so-called third-country deportations.
Lawyers with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, representing the five migrants, accused the administration of using its agreement with Ghana to ignore the legal protections that prevent deportation to their home countries because they fear torture or persecution. In essence, they argued, the administration has enabled an “end run” around those prohibitions, by first removing them to Ghana, and then claiming it is powerless to stop Ghana from sending them to their home countries.
“Defendants have enlisted the government of Ghana to do their dirty work,” the lawyers said in their filing. “Despite the minimal, pass-through involvement of the Ghanaian government, defendants’ objective is clear: Deport individuals who have been granted fear-based relief from being sent to their countries of origin to those countries anyway, in contravention to the rulings of U.S. immigration judges and U.S. immigration law.”
One type of legal protection for those migrants includes a status called “withholding of removal,” the same protection that should have prevented Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador.
In their court filings, the lawyers representing those migrants described their clients in “abysmal” living conditions in a remote detention facility known as Dema Camp at an undisclosed location in Ghana. One of the five migrants, a bisexual man from Gambia, where same-sex relationships are criminalized, was deported to his home country Wednesday.
Those still held in Ghana do not know where they are, the lawyers said, and face the imminent threat that they too will be sent to their home countries.
As those lawyers raced against the clock Friday evening to prevent more of their clients from being removed from Ghana, a lawyer for the Justice Department advanced an argument that the Trump administration has previously used in the case of Abrego Garcia, effectively saying that once a migrant had been removed from the United States and was in foreign custody, the issue was out of their hands.
The Supreme Court has broadly allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own, and had paused a federal judge’s ruling that said they must first be given a chance to show that they would face the risk of torture. In this case, lawyers for the migrants also alleged that the Trump administration had “secreted them away to Ghana, to which none has any connection” without due process.
According to court documents, on Sept. 5, administration officials deported 14 migrants to Ghana — including the five who are represented in the case. At the time, the United States had no publicly known agreement with Ghana to accept deported migrants, and Ghana’s president did not publicly reveal that agreement — and the deportation of the 14 migrants — until Wednesday.
In his news conference Wednesday, President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana told reporters that his government had moved to return the migrants to their home countries.
It is not the first time that a country has decided to send migrants to their home countries after previously agreeing to take them. In July, the tiny African kingdom of Eswatini said that it “would facilitate” the removal of migrants arriving from the United States “to their countries of origin.”
But the lawyers with Asian Americans Advancing Justice wrote that Mahama’s statement — in addition to other statements by U.S. and Ghanaian officials — indicated that the Trump administration had knowingly violated the law.
The five plaintiffs, identified by their initials for fear of persecution in their home counties, are citizens of Nigeria and Gambia. One man, known in the filing as K.S., was deported to Gambia despite the fact that he had been granted a legal protection preventing deportation to his home country on the basis of his sexuality. K.S. is a bisexual man, and Gambia criminalizes relationships between men with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
K.S., according to a court filing, is in hiding in Gambia and fears for his life. The other four plaintiffs are still in Ghana, and have been told by officials that they too will be deported to their home countries. Judge Tanya S. Chutkan is currently weighing a request by the plaintiff’s lawyers to block those deportations.