Court Blocks Trump From Shipping Migrants To Libya

NBC News reports:

A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order preventing migrants from being sent to Libya or any other third country after immigration attorneys filed an emergency motion Wednesday. The United States reportedly plans to send a group of undocumented immigrants to Libya as early as this week. A U.S. military aircraft is expected to transport the migrants who are from the Philippines, Vietnam and Laos, among other countries, the motion said.

The plaintiffs are being set for removal “without any reasonable fear screening, let alone a fifteen-day window to file a motion to reopen with the immigration court to contest any negative reasonable fear determination,” according to the motion, which was filed in U.S District Court in Massachusetts.

In one case, the attorneys said in the motion, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at a South Texas detention facility gathered several detainees in a room. The detainees were told that they needed to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya, the document said. When they refused, they were put in separate rooms, “cuffed in,” and forced to sign the document, the motion says.

Read the full article. There’s much more. As NBC notes, Libya has a record of treating migrants with “arbitrary detention, murder, torture, rape, enslavement, sexual slavery, extrajudicial killing and enforced disappearance.”

HOLY CRAP. The D.V.D. litigators say the Trump administration’s planned flight to Libya is going to be for ASIAN nationals, including Cambodians, Filipinos, and Vietnamese people — and that say that ICE is throwing people into solitary for refusing to agree to be sent to Libya! https://t.co/AYFnukNNN4 pic.twitter.com/s5IjL2PpTg

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) May 7, 2025