Late last night, a federal district court judge in Massachusetts ordered the US government to “facilitate” the return of a Guatemalan man who was deported to Mexico despite having presented evidence that he had been kidnapped and raped there on his way to the United States last year.
The man, known in court documents as O.C.G., won an order in his immigration case in February protecting him from being deported to Guatemala, which he said he fled after facing violence and persecution for his sexuality. Two days later— thinking, according to court documents, that he was being released from immigration detention—he was loaded onto a bus with other men and brought from the US to Mexico, where authorities then deported him to Guatemala anyway.
O.C.G. is now living in hiding in Guatemala, avoiding going out or being seen with family, according to a sworn declaration filed in his lawsuit. “The people who targeted me before know who I am and they have shown me twice before what they’re capable of,” he said. “I can’t be gay here, which means I cannot be myself. I cannot express myself and I am not free.”
District Judge Brian E. Murphy, who also ruled Wednesday against the Trump administration’s attempt to deport migrants not from South Sudan to that country, wrote in his order that O.C.G. was likely to succeed in showing “that his removal lacked any semblance of due process” and that the federal government couldn’t legally send him to Mexico without taking additional steps in the immigration case. “Those necessary steps, and O.C.G.’s pleas for help, were ignored,” Murphy wrote. “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.”
Now, it’s up to US authorities to bring O.C.G. back—or, in the language of the court order, to “facilitate” his return. Last month, the Supreme Court likewise ordered the government to facilitate the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man from Maryland who was mistakenly deported and sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious “terrorism confinement center.” Yet Abrego Garcia remains in custody, with the US government claiming it lacks the authority to remove him from El Salvador’s custody—even as Trump insists he “could” return him with a phone call.
Murphy, in his order on Friday, appeared to anticipate that the US government would similarly fail to act in O.C.G.’s case. He added in a footnote that that the word “facilitate” in his order should “carry less baggage than in several other notable cases. O.C.G. is not held by any foreign government.”
Murphy also slammed government lawyers for previously asserting that O.C.G. had, at some point, said he was unafraid of being sent to Mexico. Because of that claim, Murphy had stopped short of ordering O.C.G. returned in an earlier order. But when the government had to produce a witness to back up that claim, its lawyers told the court it had been an “error.”
“Defendants apparently cannot find a witness to support their claim that O.C.G. ever said that he was unafraid of being sent to Mexico,” Murphy fumed in his Friday order. “The Court was given false information, upon which it relied, twice, to the detriment of a party at risk of serious and irreparable harm.”
If Murphy appears fed up, it’s because he’s spent the week dealing with the government’s attempts to deport immigrants to third-party countries without giving them a chance to object. In April, the judge issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit brought by O.C.G. and other immigrants ordering the United States to give them a “meaningful opportunity” to express a fear of death, torture, or persecution before they are sent to a country that is not their own.
“This case presents a simple question,” Murphy wrote in that order: “Before the United States forcibly sends someone to a country other than their country of origin, must that person be told where they are going and be given a chance to tell the United States that they might be killed if sent there?”
On Wednesday, Murphy ruled that the Trump administration had violated his injunction when it attempted to send a plane full of immigrants from multiple countries to South Sudan, as my colleagues Isabela Dias and Noah Lanard reported this week:
The complaint alleges at least two of the men, a national of Myanmar identified as N.M., and T.T.P., a Vietnamese man, were given a notice of removal on Monday, May 19, in English only, despite the requirement in Judge Murphy’s preliminary injunction that the form be provided in a “language the alien can understand.” They declined to sign the notice, according to court documents.
A Justice Department attorney said during the hearing that the men remained in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The plane reportedly landed in Djibouti, in East Africa, according to ICE flight trackers and the New York Times, instead of South Sudan. As of Wednesday, the men were still believed to be in Djibouti, which is home to a US military base.
