The Trump administration must arrange the return of an immigrant who was deported to Mexico without being afforded his legal right to raise fears of torture or persecution, a federal judge ruled Friday night.
The ruling marks the third time that courts have ordered the administration to try to bring back deportees who were found to have been improperly or illegally deported. So far, however, the administration has not cooperated in returning the immigrants to the U.S. so they can receive the due process that, according to the courts, is legally required.
Friday’s ruling from U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy concerns a Guatemala native, identified in court papers only as O.C.G., who claims he had been raped and targeted for being gay during a previous stint in Mexico. His lawyers say he was not given a chance to assert those fears when the Trump administration put him on a bus in February and delivered him across the border. Mexican authorities then deported him to Guatemala, where he has also faced threats of persecution and violence.
U.S. and international law prohibit deporting people to countries where they are likely to be tortured. People in deportation proceedings in the U.S. have the right to formally seek protection from deportation on the basis that they may face torture in the country where they are designated to be sent.
“In general, this case presents no special facts or legal circumstances, only the banal horror of a man being wrongfully loaded onto a bus and sent back to a country where he was allegedly just raped and kidnapped,” Murphy, a Boston-based Biden appointee, wrote in a 14-page decision.
“The Court finds that the public benefits from living in a country where rules are followed and where promises are kept,” the judge continued, noting that one of those promises is not to send people to countries where there is reason to believe they will be tortured. “The return of O.C.G. poses a vanishingly small cost to make sure we can still claim to live up to that ideal,” Murphy concluded.
Administration officials have already been ordered to facilitate the return of two men deported in March to a high-security prison in El Salvador aboard a series of controversial flights.
One of those cases reached the Supreme Court, with the justices largely upholding a lower court’s order requiring the Trump administration to work to bring Salvadoran native Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. The Supreme Court noted that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was “illegal” because an immigration court had expressly ruled that he could not be deported there due to a risk that he would be targeted by a local gang.
The other case involves a Venezuelan man, Daniel Lozano-Camargo, who was sent to El Salvador under President Donald Trump’s order invoking a wartime power in an 18th century law to expel alleged gang members. A judge found that Lozano-Camargo’s deportation violated a court-approved legal settlement that protected certain undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors.
The situation involving the Guatemalan man may be simpler to resolve than the other two deportations the Trump administration was ordered to reverse. Those men are in prisons in El Salvador. O.C.G. is not incarcerated but is currently in hiding in Guatemala in a house owned by his sister, his attorneys say.
However, O.C.G.’s safety in Guatemala is also in question. A federal judge barred immigration officials from deporting him to his home country over fears of persecution and violence. The Trump administration deported him to Mexico, which then sent him to Guatemala.
The administration initially told Murphy that O.C.G. had been asked if he had any fear of being sent to Mexico and that he didn’t express any concerns.
However, last week — after Murphy asked that those who spoke with O.C.G. be made available for a deposition — Justice Department attorneys said they could not locate any immigration official who recalled having such a conversation with the Guatemalan man before he was deported.
Murphy said the flip-flop raised questions about the candor of U.S. government officials.
“It must be said that, while mistakes obviously happen, the events leading up to this decision are troubling. The Court was given false information, upon which it relied, twice, to the detriment of a party at risk of serious and irreparable harm,” the judge wrote.
Lawyers for O.C.G. suggested in court this week that it would be possible to charter a flight for him if the court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return.
Murphy’s ruling is just the latest rebuke to the Trump administration in an ongoing case that involves numerous deportations and has increasingly drawn national attention. Murphy has admonished the Trump administration for seeking to quickly deport people to alternate countries — when their home countries won’t accept them or are considered too dangerous — without offering meaningful notice or a chance to raise fear of torture and death.
In recent weeks, Murphy stepped in to restrict the administration’s ability to send waves of migrants to Libya and South Sudan. Those rulings prompted an increasingly furious and high-level response from the Trump administration.
That response escalated again Friday, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Murphy of directly interfering with the United States’ effort to forge stronger relationships with the governments of Libya and South Sudan, and jeopardizing its relationship with Djibouti, home to the only U.S. military base in Africa.
In a declaration filed in the court case, Rubio suggested that the judge’s statements — that a rapid deportation of foreign nationals to Libya would violate an order he issued — contributed to “the most violent street fighting in Tripoli since 2022.” The secretary also asserted that Murphy’s orders related to a deportation flight the Trump administration attempted to send to South Sudan were “almost certain” to lead to “delayed or significantly reduced humanitarian efforts.”
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