For the previous a number of months, the Trump administration has been making an attempt to deport immigrants to international locations they don’t seem to be from – regardless of an April 2025 federal ruling that had blocked the White Home from doing so.
A divided Supreme Court docket decided on June 23, in a brief emergency order, that the Trump administration can, for now, legally deport immigrants to international locations they weren’t born in – referred to as “third international locations” – with out giving them time to contest their vacation spot. The third countries that President Donald Trump has just lately prioritized, together with El Salvador, South Sudan and Libya, are identified for being harmful locations with weak rule of regulation and routine human rights violations.
The 6-3 determination didn’t specify a authorized rationale for the ruling. The courtroom’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all dissented.
“Apparently, the Court docket finds the concept that hundreds will undergo violence in farflung locales extra palatable than the distant risk {that a} District Court docket exceeded its powers when it ordered the federal government present discover to the focused migrants,” Sotomayor wrote in a 19-page dissent, joined by Kagan and Brown Jackson.
Understanding this authorized case
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on the finish of Could to permit the rapid deportation of eight men who had been convicted of crimes to South Sudan. Solely a kind of immigrants is from South Sudan, a politically unstable nation in northeastern Africa. The remaining are from Cuba, Mexico, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
Brian Murphy, a federal decide in Massachusetts, had blocked these immigrants’ deportation to South Sudan on Could 21, saying that this transfer violated his April 2025 court order. In that ruling, he said that individuals being deported to 3rd international locations ought to have time to contest their vacation spot if it’d put them in peril.
The flight to South Sudan was rerouted to an American army base within the East African nation of Djibouti, the place the boys are reportedly residing in a converted shipping container whereas they wait to listen to whether or not they are going to be deported to South Sudan.
Murphy additionally dominated in April that the Trump administration cannot send other immigrants to Libya if they don’t seem to be international nationals of that North African nation.
I study how restrictive immigration insurance policies make folks’s journeys into a brand new nation harmful and might harm their well-being. In that analysis, I’ve interviewed African migrants who’ve traversed the Sahara Desert, Libya and the Mediterranean Sea to achieve Europe, the place they search asylum.
The White Home has not defined why it wants to send immigrants to South Sudan or Libya.
Libya’s authorities has denied any direct coordination with the U.S. on this situation, and South Sudan’s authorities has mentioned that any immigrants deported there with legal data would be sent to their own countries.
However a Could federal court filing mentioned that Trump administration officers have tried to barter deportation preparations with Libya and South Sudan that give the governments cash or different advantages for taking in immigrants from the U.S.
South Sudan Presidency/Anadolu via Getty Images
South Sudan’s shaky footing
Migrants can legally be deported to a different nation when their nation of origin refuses to repatriate them – although this practice is rare.
Former President Joe Biden, for instance, deported Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to Mexico if it was politically or logistically tough to repatriate them.
However the Trump administration is the primary to insist on expedited removing of immigrants to international locations exterior of Latin America.
South Sudan became a country in 2011, when it cut up from Sudan after a decades-long warfare. Since then, South Sudan has been led by a single president – Salva Kiir – who has been described by worldwide critics as authoritarian, that means he tries to centralize his personal energy and restrict different folks’s political rights. In March 2025, Kiir oversaw the arrest of vice president and opposition leader Riek Machar.
Preventing between the federal government and opposition forces has prompted greater than 2.3 million South Sudanese to flee to neighboring international locations since 2013.
In 2025 alone, the nation’s civil battle has prompted more than 130,000 people to develop into internally displaced, that means they had been compelled to depart their properties and dwell elsewhere inside the nation.
In March, Uganda deployed its troops to South Sudan to help the president, prompting concern of a full-scale civil warfare between forces backing Kiir and opposition forces. The United Nations then extended a U.S.-sponsored arms embargo in Could to stop weapons from reaching the area.
The battle has additionally blocked the distribution of lifesaving aid, together with meals and different fundamental provides, to achieve folks in South Sudan. About 57% of the nation’s estimated 11 million folks do not get enough food.
In March, the U.S. State Department ordered nonemergency U.S. authorities staff to depart South Sudan.
The State Division has additionally documented “significant human rights issues” in South Sudan, together with threats to freedom of expression, in addition to arbitrary arrests and detentions.
Libya’s hazard for migrants
Mahmud Turkia/AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration can also be making an attempt to ship immigrants to Libya, which has not had a secure authorities because the U.S. and other countries supported the overthrow of dictator Muammar Gadhafi in 2011. Libya is at present dominated by two rival governments: the internationally acknowledged Authorities of Nationwide Unity within the nation’s western area and the Authorities of Nationwide Stability within the east.
The U.S. has not had an embassy in Libya since 2014 as a consequence of unpredictable and unstable safety there.
Armed militias management sections of Libya, and in some instances, they are also embedded as part of the governments.
Libya is a big vacation spot for migrants from international locations all through Africa and the Center East who wish to work in, or simply cross by way of, Libya on their means north to Europe.
It is usually a harmful place for migrants. A 2023 U.N. fact-finding mission in Libya documented what migrants have long maintained in interviews with advocacy teams – they’re regularly held for ransom by human traffickers, enslaved, and arrested and tortured in detention facilities partly funded by Europe.
A mass grave present in 2021 near the village of Tarhouna contained the our bodies of lots of of locals who had disappeared beneath militia rule. In February 2025, the U.N. confirmed the invention of mass migrant graves, with our bodies displaying indicators of gunshot wounds.
In a Could 2025 court declaration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio mentioned that the injunction halting speedy third-country deportations threatens “a big industrial deal to increase actions of a U.S. power firm in Libya.” In Libya, house to Africa’s largest oil reserves, U.S. companies are actively searching for to rekindle partnerships with the nation’s nationwide oil firm.
In June, Trump included Libya on the listing of nations banned from sending residents to the U.S., citing the lack to “safely and reliably vet and screen” residents from Libya and the opposite banned international locations.
Different choices for Trump administration
The U.S. is actively searching for extra international locations it might ship immigrants to sooner or later, even when they don’t seem to be from these locations.
Rubio issued a memo on June 14, about increasing the listing of nations within the present travel ban in opposition to international nationals from 12 international locations, together with Libya. He famous that the 36 extra international locations – largely in Africa and together with South Sudan – might mitigate the tough coverage by agreeing to just accept immigrants from different international locations who’re deported from the U.S.
