By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. judge on Saturday said it appeared that President Donald Trump’s administration intentionally circumvented immigration laws this week when it deported Nigerian and Gambian migrants to Ghana.
Judge Tanya Chutkan, based in Washington, D.C., scheduled an emergency hearing after lawyers representing some of the migrants said their clients expected they could be moved to their home countries, where they fear torture or persecution.
The deportations are part of Trump’s strategy to send migrants to “third countries” to speed their removal and pressure migrants in the U.S. illegally to leave.
Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama said this week that his nation struck an agreement with the U.S. to accept West African deportees and had already received 14 people.
Chutkan said it appeared the Trump administration crafted the deal as a way “to make an end run” around U.S. legal requirements that it refrain from sending migrants to danger in their home countries.
“These are not speculative concerns,” said Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama. “The concerns are real enough that the United States government agrees they shouldn’t be sent back to their home country.”
Still, Chutkan said it was not immediately clear what actions she could take or whether the case should go before a Boston-based judge hearing a broader case over such removals.
A lawsuit filed Friday on behalf of five of the migrants said they were taken from a Louisiana immigration detention center, shackled and put on a U.S. military plane without being told their destination. Several migrants on the flight were placed in straitjackets for 16 hours, the complaint said.
The five plaintiffs had U.S. legal protections against deportation to their home countries, the lawsuit said. One of the migrants, a bisexual man, has already been sent to Gambia and was in hiding, it said. The other four have been held in squalid conditions in an open-air detention facility operated by the Ghanaian military, it said.
In a court filing, the U.S. Department of Justice said it no longer had custody of the migrants, that the court lacked authority to intervene in diplomatic actions and that a Supreme Court decision in June allowed the government to send migrants to nations other than their country of citizenship.
Plaintiffs are represented by two advocacy groups, the American Civil Liberties Union and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
The deportations have sparked criticism in Ghana.
In a statement on Friday, opposition lawmakers called for the agreement to be suspended, saying it should have been approved by Ghana’s National Assembly.
The deal “risks our country being perceived as aligning itself with the U.S. government’s current immigration enforcement regime, one which has been criticized as harsh and discriminatory,” the statement said.
A Ghana government spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson; Additional reporting by Emmanuel Bruce in Accra; Editing by Scott Malone and David Gregorio)
