The Supreme Court ruled from its emergency docket that the Trump administration could temporarily send immigrants to third-party countries with which they have no connection.
Migrants from Guatemala are deported to their country with a United States military plane at the Fort Bliss facility in El Paso, Texas, on January 30, 2025.
(Christian Torres / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court’s six conservative judges ruled that, while cases were proceeding in the lower courts, the Trump administration could temporarily resume its rapid deportation of immigrants to third-party countries with which they have no connection. Trump officials immediately announced that they would challenge a lower court’s injunction preventing them from deporting eight men, currently being housed in a converted shipping container on an airbase in Djibouti, to South Sudan, a country that seven of the eight detainees had no links to.
The eight men in Djibouti represent low-hanging fruit for an administration hell-bent on inflicting pain, fear, and the threat of physical and mental harm on immigrants. They are from Myanmar, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Mexico, and—one of them—South Sudan. All have been convicted of violent offenses, according to the administration. In other words, they are unlikely to trigger much public sympathy and are, in consequence, perfect lab rats upon whom to test-run a grotesque new expulsion-into-exile policy and executive power theory.
Late last month, the eight men were bundled, with virtually no advance notice, onto transport planes and flown to Djibouti, with an intended final destination of South Sudan. Because a judge in Boston intervened, issuing an injunction against their deportation to South Sudan, they were kept in limbo in Djibouti, where, for the past month, they have been guarded around the clock by a roster of DHS agents.
Now the administration wants to fast-track their deportation to one of the poorest and most violent countries on earth.
There is literally no legitimate reason to deport these men to South Sudan. On a scale of zero to 100, WorldData.com gives the country zero for civil rights and for health, and it awards the country 92 (listed as “catastrophic”) on its corruption index. Indeed, the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Center lists South Sudan as having a “kleptocratic dynamic” and reports that “it regularly ranks at or near the bottom of international corruption indices. Corruption is systemic across all levels of government and pervades nearly every economic sector, and perpetrators enjoy widespread impunity.”
The average per capita income in South Sudan is $460 per year, and the total GDP of the entire economy is just $3 billion, about one ten-thousandth of the US GDP. Elon Musk could buy the country 150 times over and still come out ahead. More than one in five South Sudanese suffers from HIV/AIDS, and one in 40 has tuberculosis.
The World Health Organization estimates that the life expectancy for a South Sudanese resident is a mere 58 years. After independence from Sudan, in 2011, South Sudan fell into years of civil war; and even though that conflict has now officially ended, the Council on Foreign Relations reports that intercommunal violence is ongoing and that “the country continues to suffer from one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.” Because of the prevalence of kidnapping and armed conflict, the State Department has a “do not travel” advisory for South Sudan, listing it as Level 4—its highest warning level—because of the likelihood that travelers will experience extreme violence.
This is the country that Trump will now be deporting immigrants to. It is astounding that the Supreme Court seems comfortable giving its imprimatur to this idea.
In her scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “the Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard.” She went on to say that, in consequence, the Supreme Court’s intervention in the case could well lead to “exposing thousands to the risk of torture or death.”
Within hours of the ruling, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin confirmed these fears, gloating that it was time to “fire up the deportation planes.”
This is all being done in the name of the American people, in our names. It is a calculated, deliberate deportation of migrants into harm’s way. There is simply no other explanation for why the administration would send anyone to South Sudan. It is the use of atrocious conditions to terrify migrants into either self-deporting or not coming to the US in the first place; it is also, quite possibly, the use of these atrocious conditions to further dehumanize immigrants. After all, it seems inconceivable that the courts would allow for US citizens to be sent to a place the State Department has basically identified as on a par with one of Dante’s circles of hell; if the courts do permanently permit immigrants to be sent there, then doesn’t that legitimize the MAGA ideology that they are lesser beings, vested with lesser rights than are the rest of us and inured to otherwise unendurable conditions? It’s not too different a psychological argument than that used by the Nazis in ghettoizing the Jews, and then further demonizing them and questioning their humanity for their lice-riddled bodies and clothes, their filthy appearances, their manifest poverty after having spent months in those ghettoes.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
When I was heading to a hotel in New York City last week, my cab driver kept switching his radio from one hard-right talking head to the next. Each was laser-focused on undocumented immigrants, and each was more bilious than the last. There was Kristi Noem reading aloud a PSA condemning undocumented immigrants for an array of blood-curdling crimes. There was someone else talking about rapist and pedophile migrants. There was someone ranting about immigrants taking jobs and benefits from Americans.
For them, immigrants are bad people—the sort of people who deserve to get bundled onto aircraft and flown half away around the world to be dropped off in a violent country where everything will conspire not just against their chances of success but even against their prospects for survival. For them, all undocumented immigrants are desperadoes, rather than, as most of them are, ordinary people trying to secure safety and education and opportunity, decent wages and clean environments, and steady food supplies for themselves and their families.
Not one of these opinion-shapers mentioned America’s glorious heritage as a country big enough, physically and spiritually, to welcome in migrants by the millions. Not one acknowledged the overwhelming economic and cultural benefits migration has delivered over the centuries.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… and I will give them a one-way ticket to the newest circle of Dante’s hell.” It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as the original “New Colossus” poem, but, I fear, it speaks more honestly to the state of things in the America of 2025.
In this moment of crisis, we need a unified, progressive opposition to Donald Trump.
We’re starting to see one take shape in the streets and at ballot boxes across the country: from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign focused on affordability, to communities protecting their neighbors from ICE, to the senators opposing arms shipments to Israel.
The Democratic Party has an urgent choice to make: Will it embrace a politics that is principled and popular, or will it continue to insist on losing elections with the out-of-touch elites and consultants that got us here?
At The Nation, we know which side we’re on. Every day, we make the case for a more democratic and equal world by championing progressive leaders, lifting up movements fighting for justice, and exposing the oligarchs and corporations profiting at the expense of us all. Our independent journalism informs and empowers progressives across the country and helps bring this politics to new readers ready to join the fight.
We need your help to continue this work. Will you donate to support The Nation’s independent journalism? Every contribution goes to our award-winning reporting, analysis, and commentary.
Thank you for helping us take on Trump and build the just society we know is possible.
Sincerely,
Bhaskar Sunkara
President, The Nation
More from The Nation
Collier speaks about her surreal ordeal, wherein she refused to sign a permission slip and accept a police escort to leave the Austin statehouse and had to sleep there for two nig…
With every White House action, from mass deportation to domestic deployment of federal troops the “opposition party” has accepted the premise and failed to offer an alternative.
Party building vs. candidate addiction has never been more urgent.
The stairways to iconic Park Güell in Barcelona were transformed into a representation of the Palestinian flag , and the plaza above was named “Free Palestine”, as a symbol of supp…
In ordering a review of the Smithsonian, the White House wants to use its power to remake our culture—or to reinvigorate a strain in the culture that has been dormant for a long t…
