A New Gulag Archipelago
The Administration keeps looking for the perfect legal black hole
May 21, 2025
The New York Times is reporting that the Trump Administration defied a court order yeaterday by flying a group of deportees to South Sudan.
These were not for the most part normal deportations: the men were from Burma, Cuba, Laos, Mexico and Vietnam as well as South Sudan.
The questions raised about the possible flight to South Sudan was the fourth time that immigration lawyers have accused the Trump administration of bending — if not outright violating — the order by Judge Murphy in the last month. The other accusations have involved a flight of Venezuelan immigrants from Cuba to El Salvador, a planned flight of Laotian, Vietnamese and Filipino immigrants to Libya and the deportation of a Guatemalan man to Mexico.
I don’t think there is a precedent for this. Why is the government deporting people to third countries instead of sending them home?
In this case, a Homeland Security spokeswoman said “some of the most barbaric violent individuals illegally in the United States.” This is in keeping with what Trump said about dangerous criminals he would send to Guantanamo Bay, a plan that has largely fizzled.
The point in opening up a camp at Gitmo, as it always was, is to create a place where people can be held indefinitely without charge, without recourse. Presumably, shipping men to prison in El Salvador was a better fit for that goal.
What will become of these men once they arrive in South Sudan (a country the State Department advises Americans to avoid, given the ongoing civil war)? They may end up in prison, as in El Salvador. But suppose they do not. How will they survive, in an unknown, poor, conflict-wracked nation where they don’t speak the language?
They might try to find their way to their embassies in Juba. However, only Cuba, of the five nationalities on the flight, has a diplomatic mission in the country.
It is unlikely they will receive consular assistance, at least from their home countries. Perhaps some of the 16 nations with embassies in the country will help. Likely, those countries will be under pressure by the U.S. government to deny them assistance.
The intent seems to be to leave these men in the most desolate places possible, from their own cultural perspective, places where they lack the means and wherewithal to leave, or really to stay. The intent seems to be that they simply disappear, if not die.
If they are turned loose to fend for themselves, they will be well and truly unreturnable, when a federal court demands the Administration undo this injustice. It may be that the Administration is hopping from place to place to better evade justice: when they realized Gitmo is subject to the writ of habeas corpus, they switched to CECOT; when they realized that the fact that the men were imprisoned meant they are easy to locate, they shifted again.
The cruelty is still part of the point. But more than that, it is the impunity. Evading due process in a way that is irreversible, while callous and immoral as well as illegal, is effective. It will scare other immigrants that the government is pressuring to self-deport. And it should scare the hell out of the rest of us, too.