July 4th and the "barbarians"

The U.S. judiciary let Trump's Department of Homeland Security dump eight men into a South Sudanese war zone on Independence Day.

Jul 06, 2025

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin speaks at a May 21 press conference in front of images of the eight men sent to South Sudan. (ICE’s YouTube page)

In 2018, I spent the Fourth of July poring over more than 900 pages of grueling court declarations from victims and advocates exposing the inhumanity of the first Trump administration’s family separation policy.

“I simply cannot believe that my government could have done this to these people,” one advocate wrote in a sworn statement at the time.

In wrenching first-person narratives, the documents showed the turmoil of the mothers torn from their babies and toddlers and struggling to navigate callous bureaucracies to reunite with their children. One relatively fortunate mother reunited with her 1-year-old nearly three months later, finding him unbathed and covered with dirt and lice. The separated parents recounted the indignities of being shackled at the ankles and urinating themselves because they had been denied the ability to use a bathroom.

Reading those court papers seven years ago, I remembered feeling heartbroken for the parents. This year, with another immigration scandal from a new Trump administration, my sense of sadness is for the country.

“Sickos”

On Friday evening, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security celebrated a victory that they fought two Supreme Court battles to achieve: clearance to send eight men into a South Sudanese war zone.

“These barbaric criminal illegal aliens will be in South Sudan by Independence Day,” the agency’s press release promised on July 3.

Using language seen more often in New York City tabloids than on government websites, the Department of Homeland Security’s spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin called them “sickos.” All eight of the men on the flight were convicted of serious crimes, including murder, robbery, assault, rape and the sexual abuse of a minor under the age of 12, according to the agency.

The Trump administration’s messaging has been consistent: If an immigrant has been convicted or even accused of a terrible offense, anything goes.

Since May, the eight men have been held in a U.S. military base in Djibouti because a federal judge ordered that they have an opportunity to prove that they feared being tortured or killed at their destination. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy never ordered the government to return the men to the United States or even prohibited their transfer to South Sudan. He simply required that they receive the due process that U.S. statutes and the Constitution require.

For reasons the Supreme Court never explained, the conservative justices paused his orders, and the Trump administration scheduled the flight from Djibouti to depart to South Sudan at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday. This time, no federal judge would intervene, and the government confirmed that the eight men reached their destination.

“Inflicting pain on other human beings”

By the time fireworks started bursting over Washington, D.C., the Trump administration celebrated its goal: They dumped the eight men into a human-rights abusing and war-ravaged country without any notice or due process, and the Supreme Court gave their methods its stamp of approval.

Judge Murphy’s insistence that they receive the same statutory and constitutional protections as any other person turned out to be nothing more than a speed bump, and Homeland Security’s spokeswoman accused him of being on the side of the “monsters” for his efforts.

That’s how a free society always erodes: by taking away the rights of the despised.

Hours before the plane took off, the men’s attorneys filed a last-ditch lawsuit in Washington, D.C. Before finding he had no jurisdiction to intervene, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss expressed “grave” concerns about the Trump administration’s actions.

“It goes without saying that even when someone has been convicted of committing a terrible crime … our government should be prohibited from inflicting pain on other human beings for the sake of doing so,” Moss said.

That proposition isn’t so self-evident to a government gleefully boasting about “Alligator Alcatraz,” a plan to build internment camps for immigrants in the Florida Everglades. The Trump White House’s official social media platforms mocked the possibility that immigrants might be eaten by reptiles if they escape, an image with an ugly, racist pedigree from the Jim Crow South.

When asked in court whether the government could send someone from a tropical climate to the Arctic Circle just to make the destination unpleasant, a Justice Department attorney did not directly answer the question.

“Exposing thousands to the risk of torture or death”

The men on the flight to South Sudan may have committed “barbaric” acts, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that, in authorizing their transfer, the Supreme Court has laid the groundwork for suffering on a far vaster scale.

“The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard,” Sotomayor wrote. “The episodes of noncompliance in this very case illustrate the risks. Thirteen noncitizens narrowly escaped being the target of extraordinary violence in Libya; [a gay asylum seeker identified in court documents as] O.C.G. spent months in hiding in Guatemala; others face release in South Sudan, which the State Department says is in the midst of ‘armed conflict’ between ‘ethnic groups.’”

Sotomayor said the court’s ruling was “exposing thousands to the risk of torture or death.”

It’s hard for anyone to call that statement hyperbolic: The GOP’s spending bill just gave immigration authorities a budget that rivals most of the world’s militaries, making it the largest law enforcement agency in U.S. history. The Trump administration may now feel emboldened to use that vast deportation force to send immigrants to any human rights abuser on the map without any notice or process.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem infamously described habeas corpus as the “constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” turning the definition precisely on its head. Since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, habeas corpus has been the vehicle to force the government to justify an illegal detention. The inversion of that principle represents a regression in human civilization, one not so far removed from the so-called “barbarian” era used to justify it.