A U.S. federal judge, Brian Murphy, on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration not to let a group of migrants being flown to South Sudan leave the custody of U.S. immigration authorities.
The judge added that the migrants appeared to have been deported in violation of a court order.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston, during a hastily arranged virtual hearing, said that while he was not going to order the aeroplane to turn around, that was an option for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security could employ to comply with his order.
Murphy warned that officials could be held in criminal contempt if he found they violated his previous order barring the swift deportation of migrants to countries other than their own before they could raise any concerns that they might face torture or persecution there.
“I have a strong indication that my preliminary injunction order has been violated,” Murphy told Elianis Perez, a lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Murphy, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, said any migrants covered by the injunction en route to the African nation must remain in the government’s custody pending a further hearing on Wednesday.
He said the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, could comply with that order in a myriad of ways, including keeping the migrants on the plane on the tarmac once it lands.
“I’m not going to limit DHS on where they hold them,” Murphy said. “If they want to turn the plane around, they can.”
The development marked a new clash between the federal judiciary and Republican President Donald Trump’s administration in its efforts to implement Trump’s calls for mass deportations as part of his hardline immigration agenda.
Another jurist, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, last month found “probable cause” to hold officials in criminal contempt for violating his order halting deportations of alleged members of a Venezuelan gang who had no chance to challenge their removals.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday maintained a block on Trump’s deportations of Venezuelan migrants under a 1798 law historically used only in wartime, faulting his administration for seeking to remove them without adequate due process.
