By Ted Hesson, Phil Stewart and Humeyra Pamuk
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Migrants in Texas who were told they would be deported to Libya sat on a military airfield tarmac for hours on Wednesday, unsure of what would happen next, an attorney for one of the men told Reuters.
The attorney, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said his client, a Vietnamese construction worker from Los Angeles, was among the migrants woken in the early morning hours and bused from an immigration detention center in Pearsall, Texas, to an airfield where a military aircraft awaited them.
After several hours, they were bused back to the detention center around noon, the attorney said on Thursday.
The Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Reuters was first to report that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration was poised to deport migrants to Libya, a move that would escalate his immigration crackdown which has already drawn legal backlash.
Officials earlier this week told Reuters the U.S. military could fly the migrants to the North African country as soon as Wednesday, but stressed that plans could change.
A U.S. official told Reuters the flight never departed. As of Friday, it was unclear if the administration was still planning to proceed with the deportations.
A federal judge in Boston ruled on Wednesday that any effort by the Trump administration to deport non-Libyan migrants to Libya without adequate screenings for possible persecution or torture would clearly violate a prior court order.
Lawyers for a group of migrants pursuing a class action lawsuit had made an emergency request to the court hours after the news broke of the potential flight to Libya.
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
Nguyen, who declined to name his client, said the man was told on Monday to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya. The man, who does not read English well, declined to sign it and was placed in solitary confinement and shackled along with four or five other men, the attorney said.
The man was never provided an opportunity to express a fear of being deported to Libya as required under federal immigration law and the recent judicial order, Nguyen said.
“They said, ‘We’re deporting you to Libya,’ even though he hadn’t signed the form, he didn’t know what the form was,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen said his client, originally from Vietnam, has lived in the U.S. since the 1990s but was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year during a regular check-in.
Vietnam declines to accept some deportees and processes deportation paperwork slowly, Nguyen said, making it harder for the U.S. to send deportees there.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson, Phil Stewart and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Richard Chang)
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