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Immigrants detained in Texas were loaded onto buses and taken to a military airfield on Wednesday in what appeared to be a covert deportation attempt to Libya, only to be returned hours later to detention without explanation, according to attorneys and immigration advocates.
Among the group was a Vietnamese construction worker from Los Angeles, represented by attorney Tin Thanh Nguyen, who said his client was one of many woken in the early hours at the Pearsall immigration detention center and transported under heavy security to an undisclosed airstrip. A military aircraft reportedly waited on the tarmac.
“They sat on the airfield for hours, not knowing what was happening,” Nguyen told Reuters. “Then around noon, they were bussed back. No explanation, no process.”
Neither the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, nor the State Department responded to multiple requests for comment.
The incident comes amid reports that the Trump administration was preparing to deport non-Libyan immigrants to Libya, an escalation in its hardline immigration crackdown, despite a federal court order that specifically bars such action without adequate legal screenings.
A Boston federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the administration would be in clear violation of a prior order if it proceeded with deporting non-Libyans to Libya without giving them a legal avenue to express fear of persecution or torture.
According to Nguyen, his client was pressured earlier this week to sign documents agreeing to deportation to Libya, a country with which he has no connection. The man, who struggles to read English, refused to sign after not understanding the form. He was then allegedly placed in solitary confinement and shackled.
“They told him, ‘You’re going to Libya,’ even though he hadn’t signed anything and wasn’t given a chance to say he feared for his life,” Nguyen said.
The Vietnamese national has lived in the United States since the 1990s and was detained earlier this year during a routine Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) check-in, an increasingly risky event for long-term undocumented immigrants.
Because Vietnam often declines to accept deportees or delays the paperwork process, ICE has turned to alternative countries, including Rwanda, as potential destinations for deportation, sources say.
The bizarre episode has intensified concerns among immigrant rights lawyers who accuse the administration of circumventing due process and international human rights norms.
“There’s no legal or moral justification to deport someone to a country they’re not from, especially without screening them for danger,” said a lawyer involved in an emergency class-action lawsuit filed after the news broke.
As of Friday, U.S. officials confirmed that the flight to Libya never departed, but offered no clarity on whether plans to carry out the deportations were permanently scrapped or merely delayed.
Meanwhile, detainees remain in legal limbo, shaken by the attempted deportation to a war-torn country many have never even set foot in.
