Judge briefly blocks immigrants’ deportation to South Sudan, but legal path eventually cleared

Despite a federal judge briefly halting deportations of eight immigrants to war-torn South Sudan, he and a second judge eventually cleared the way for the Trump administration to relocate the immigrants the day after the Supreme Court greenlighted their removal.

The unusually-busy Fourth of July court schedule began with District Judge Randolph Moss in Washington, D.C., putting a temporary hold on the deportations while he evaluated a last-ditch appeal by the immigrants’ lawyers. In an afternoon hearing, he decided he was powerless to halt their removals and that the person best positioned to rule on the request was Brian Murphy, the federal judge in Boston whose rulings led to the initial halt of the administration’s effort to begin deportations to the eastern African country.

But on Friday evening, Murphy issued a brief ruling concluding that the Supreme Court had tied his hands. “This Court interprets these Supreme Court orders as binding on this new petition, as Petitioners are now raising substantially similar claims, and therefore Petitioners motion is denied,” Murphy wrote.

The administration had earlier said it intended Friday to move the immigrants from the U.S. naval base in Djibouti, where they and their guards have lingered for weeks as their case has ricocheted through the courts, to South Sudan.

The administration has been trying to deport the immigrants for weeks. None are from South Sudan, which is enmeshed in civil war and where the U.S. government has advised against travel. The government flew them to Djibouti but couldn’t move them further because Murphy had ruled no immigrant could be sent to a new country without a chance to have a court hearing.

The Supreme Court vacated that decision last month, then issued a new order Thursday night clarifying that it meant the immigrants could be moved to South Sudan. Lawyers for the immigrants, who hail from Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and other countries, filed the ultimately unsuccessful emergency request to halt their removal later that night.

The temporary stay was first reported by legal journalist Chris Geidner.