Tacoma man held in East Africa part of latest Trump fight over deportations
A Tacoma man is among a group of men convicted of serious crimes that President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to send to South Sudan as part of Trump’s ongoing effort to deport undocumented immigrants.
Lawyers for 43-year-old Tuan Phan learned this week that he and eight other men are being held in a converted shipping container in leg shackles at a United States Naval base in Djibouti in East Africa. The men were routed there following a May 20 deportation flight from Texas after a federal judge in Boston intervened.
Judge Brian Murphy found that the Department of Homeland Security had violated a court order by failing to provide the men a meaningful opportunity to assert any fears they had about being deported to a country not listed on their removal orders.
Murphy said the U.S. Department of State has a “do not travel” advisory for South Sudan due to crime, kidnapping and armed conflict.
Conditions at the U.S. military base in Djibouti are also dangerous. In a sworn declaration filed Thursday, a DHS official said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were warned when they arrived of the imminent danger of rocket attacks from terrorist groups in Yemen. Officers and detainees have felt ill, the official said, noting that smog clouds from nearby burn pits disposing of trash and human waste made it difficult to breathe.
In news releases about the deportations, DHS said the flights to South Sudan were to remove some of the “most barbaric, violent individuals illegally in the United States.” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Murphy’s ruling that halted their removal was “deranged.”
Unlike the deportations of more than a hundred Venezuelans to El Salvador earlier this year, who according to the New York Times, mostly had no criminal records, each of the eight men in this case have been convicted of violent crimes.
An attorney for Phan with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Glenda Aldana Madrid, said Phan and his wife, Ngoc, had been preparing for his deportation, but they had been planning for him to be removed to Vietnam, where he emigrated from as a child in 1991.
The two met in Tacoma as neighbors. Phan had legal permanent status, but his legal status was revoked after he was convicted of first-degree murder and second-degree assault in 2001. According to Pierce County court records, Phan, then 18, fatally shot 19-year-old Michael Holtmeyer and wounded his friend near Les Davis Pier on Ruston Way.
Holtmeyer was an innocent passerby, and prosecutors said Phan shot into a crowd because he was angry that rival gang members were harassing his friends.
Phan pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 22 years in prison. According to the DHS, he was issued a final order of removal in 2009. Some countries don’t accept deportation flights. Vietnam has previously accepted deportations for immigrants who entered the United States before 1995, according to the Asian Law Caucus.
Ngoc Phan was able to talk with her husband for a few minutes Wednesday after not hearing from him for two weeks.
“It was a relief to know that he is safe and alive, but it was extremely upsetting to know that he’s chained by the feet like an animal, living in a shipping container, and without proper medication,” Ngoc Phan said in a written statement.
The U.S. government has the authority to deport people to a third country — one other than the country designated by an immigration judge — according to Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance. But Realmuto said the court’s order was that if that’s going to happen, attorneys have to be given sufficient time to investigate whether their clients have a fear of being deported there.
In this case, Realmuto told The News Tribune on Friday, there was less than 16 hours notice before the men were brought to an airport facility in Texas and put on a plane.
Realmuto’s organization is part of the ongoing lawsuit over the men’s deportations. She said she thinks the effort to send them to South Sudan is “fear mongering.”
“The effort is punitive, but it is meant to incite fear in the United States,” Realmuto said.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also Trump’s chief foreign affairs advisor, wrote in a declaration in the case that Murphy’s court order had interfered with quiet efforts to rebuild a working relationship with the government in South Sudan’s capital, Juda.
“Before the court’s intervention, the government in South Sudan, which previously refused to accept the return of one of its own nationals, had taken steps to work more cooperatively with the U.S. government,” Rubio said.
Rubio added that cooperation between South Sudan and the U.S. was critical both in terms of removals and to advance the U.S. government’s humanitarian efforts in the country.
