Migrants told of Libya deportation waited hours on tarmac, says attorney

WASHINGTON: 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 US 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 US 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.