Trump’s latest deportation scheme is almost certainly illegal

President Donald Trump is looking to additional faraway countries to deport immigrants — another escalation of his immigration crackdown.

He has already sent immigrants to an El Salvador megaprison that is notorious for human rights abuses. Those deported include Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the government admits it wrongfully sent to El Salvador and has so far refused to return to the US.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that, as part of negotiations to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump also pressured Ukraine to take US deportees. It has yet to do so, and it’s not clear that the proposal remains under consideration.  

The US is reportedly in talks with Rwanda to deport immigrants to the country, which has a poor record on human rights under its current president, Paul Kagame.

Now, Trump is also reportedly planning to send immigrants to Libya. The administration has not publicly described the specifics of its plans, and both of Libya’s rival governments have denied they’d agreed to accept migrants.

That’s despite Libya’s record of human rights abuses in its immigrant detention centers and exploitation of migrants by human traffickers.

For those reasons, sending immigrants to Libya would be, according to legal experts, a clear violation of US and international law.

“I have the same concerns that I think we all have about all the disappearances, which is that they’re just rounding up people kind of willy-nilly, without regard for who they are, whether they have cancer, whether they’re US citizens, whether they can’t remove them,” said Becca Heller, co-founder and director of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “They’re sending them to these black sites overseas, and then claiming that they can’t get them back.”

What we know about Trump’s plans

Trump administration officials said on Tuesday that deportation flights to Libya could begin as soon as Wednesday, multiple outlets reported. 

It’s not clear how many, what nationalities they may represent, or whether they have been afforded any kind of process to challenge their deportations in the US. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for further information on Wednesday.

Lawyers for immigrants from Laos, Vietnam, and the Philippines asked a federal judge this week to prevent their clients from being sent to Libya before they had a chance to challenge their deportations in court. The attorneys claimed that, based on what their clients had told them, the immigrants were at risk of being sent to Libya in apparent violation of an earlier court order.

US District Judge Brian Murphy ruled Wednesday that, if the media reports about the planned Libya deportations are correct, the plan “blatantly defies” the court order, which requires that immigrants be granted written notice of their deportation and a “meaningful” opportunity to appeal. 

Neither of Libya’s warring government factions appears to be in on Trump’s plans, either. Both the internationally recognized government in Libya’s capital of Tripoli and warlord Khalifa Hiftar’s authorities in the eastern part of the country denied striking any agreements with the US to accept its deportees on Wednesday. 

It’s also not clear what legal authority, if any, Trump might be invoking to deport immigrants to Libya. Federal courts have temporarily blocked the administration from invoking an 18th-century wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act to find people eligible for deportation without a final removal order from an immigration judge. Trump, however, has already ignored a court order and could do so again.

But even if Trump has the authority to deport certain migrants, sending them to Libya, with its horrific record of abuse, is illegal. 

Sending immigrants to Libya would violate US and international law

It’s illegal to forcibly send immigrants to places where they will face persecution and danger. Under both US and international law — including the Convention Against Torture and a 1967 protocol implementing the Refugee Convention — this is what’s called the principle of “non-refoulement.”

Sending immigrants to Libya would violate this cornerstone of human rights law because the country, a major transit hub for migrants trying to reach Europe from Africa and the Middle East, is by no means safe. The country has been embroiled in conflict since the country’s authoritarian leader Muammar Gaddafi was killed in 2011 as part of a NATO-backed revolution. 

“Libya doesn’t even have a national government,” Heller said. “It has two competing [government] entities and a very clearly documented history of torturing and abusing migrants and refugees whom it detains.”

Libya has long been part of a migrant corridor to Europe, providing access via the Mediterranean Sea. As of 2022, the United Nations estimated that there were almost 700,000 migrants stranded in Libya as Europe strengthened its border controls.

Human traffickers have subjected immigrants in Libya to beatings, rape, torture, forced labor, and extortion. Those intercepted on their way to Europe have been held in Libyan detention centers where they have suffered similar abuses.

In 2024 alone, the United Nations documented 965 migrant deaths and disappearances in Libya.

Trump tried something like this before during his first administration. He brokered what he called “safe third country” agreements under which the US could send asylum seekers to countries including Guatemala. As is the case with Libya, immigrant advocates argued at the time that none of those countries could be considered safe and that in attempting to remove immigrants to those countries, the US was violating the principle of non-refoulement. 

“They’re all just ways to have a reign of terror over migrants for an end that I don’t completely understand,” Heller said. “It doesn’t appear to have anything to do, actually, with border security or with law enforcement.”