CNN
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A group of migrants that the Trump’s administration has been holding on a military base in Djibouti have been unable to contact their attorneys, immigrant rights groups told the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The detainees, who were initially bound for South Sudan, are part of a high-profile emergency appeal pending at the Supreme Court over the administration’s effort to remove migrants to places other than their homeland. Lower courts have required officials to provide those migrants additional notice and an opportunity to claim a fear of being tortured.
Groups representing the migrants, including the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said in a new brief that officials had “set up a private interview room” on the base but that “to date, counsel have not heard from them.”
The migrants, the groups said, “are stranded incommunicado in Djibouti, a country of which they have no knowledge, and en route to another country, South Sudan, where none have ever set foot and which remains engulfed in ongoing and intensifying armed conflict.”
The Supreme Court has repeatedly sided with Trump amid a flurry of emergency cases that have reached its docket since the president returned to power. One issue on which the White House has not fared as well has been immigration, particularly in situations where due process concerns have been raised. The high court notably barred the administration last month from deporting other migrants under the 1789 Alien Enemies Act without more notice and a chance to have their cases reviewed.
After a group of migrants facing deportation to countries other than their homeland sued over the administration’s process, US District Judge Brian Murphy, a Joe Biden appointee, in March blocked officials from carrying out those removals without offering written notice and giving the targeted immigrants a chance to demonstrate they have a credible fear of persecution or torture in that other country.
Murphy later said that the Trump administration “unquestionably” violated his court order when it tried to transfer detainees to South Sudan.
The Trump administration has argued Murphy’s requirements are not included in federal law, and DHS officials have claimed they already have procedures in place to ensure that migrants are not persecuted in a third country. They have also described the migrants facing removal to South Sudan as having deep criminal records.
But the attorneys representing the migrants at the Supreme Court pushed back on that assertion.
The administration, they told the justices in their filing Wednesday, “blatantly ignore the fact that many, if not the majority, of the class members in this case, including two of the named plaintiffs, have no criminal convictions whatsoever.”
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this report.
