Trump’s Deportations to South Sudan Are More Twisted Than They Seem

The Trump administration is deporting immigrants to countries they aren’t from and refusing to tell judges where exactly, claiming that the information is classified.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy ordered the government to maintain its custody of immigrants on a plane that the immigrants’ attorneys said was headed to South Sudan, and said that authorities might be violating an injunction he issued in late March. The judge’s order came after a hearing in which administration officials refused to say where the flight was or even where it was going.

Lawyers for the immigrants told Murphy that at least two of them were told they were being sent to South Sudan, a country with instability, violence, and political unrest that the State Department warns Americans not to visit. One Justice Department lawyer told Murphy that a Vietnamese man was deported, but refused to provide any details about the flight, including how many other immigrants were on it.

“Where is the plane?” Murphy asked DOJ lawyer Elianis Perez.

“I’m told that that information is classified, and I am told that the final destination is also classified,” Perez responded, claiming that no court order was violated because the man wasn’t afraid of deportation.

But then Murphy asked Perez the authority the government was invoking to classify the location of the flight.

“I don’t have the answer to that,” Perez responded.

Murphy had ordered the government in March not to deport immigrants to countries they aren’t from without allowing them time to challenge their removal in court. He warned the administration that any government official who took part in Tuesday’s flight and knew about the order, including the pilots, could face criminal penalties.

“Based on what I have been told,” Murphy said, “this seems like it may be contempt.”

On multiple occasions, the administration has sent immigrants to countries they aren’t from, all over the world, including Rwanda, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama. The administration has resisted any attempts at oversight, and even judicial orders to stop or slow their actions, refusing to turn planes around. Secretary of State Marco Rubio even claimed he doesn’t have to listen to court orders.

Weeks after a judge ordered the government to allow immigrants some recourse to challenge their deportations, Trump officials still won’t listen. Will the courts have to enforce criminal sanctions against government officials to compel this administration to follow the law?

Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s own intelligence agencies found that Venezuela does not control the Tren de Aragua gang, directly contradicting Trump’s justification for invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants. But instead of admitting their mistake, they decided to lie.

“We need to do some rewriting … so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” said Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard’s chief of staff, according to leaked emails viewed by The New York Times. Kent, along with former acting National Intelligence Council head Michael Collins, largely rewrote the memo together. 

The original memo stated, “While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” according to the Times.

Trump has been claiming the exact opposite since he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in March to detain and deport Venezuelan immigrants without basic due process.

To support Trump’s use of the wartime powers act, Kent began to piece a story together in the hope that it’d make Trump’s actions look more reasonable.

“Flooding our nation with ‘migrants’ and especially ‘migrants’ who are part of a violent criminal gang is the action of a hostile nation, even if the gov of Venezuela isn’t specifically tasking or enabling TDA’s operations,” Kent wrote, in an email obtained by the Times. 

“Let’s just come out and say [Tren de Aragua] leaders are given sanctuary in Venezuela as their gang members commit horrendous crimes in America, then we can provide the context about our exact knowledge of relationship between TDA and the Venezuelan government,” he continued. Kent even went so far as to say that Tren de Aragua didn’t need logistical support from the Venezuelan government because former President Joe Biden had given it to them in his first term, another lie. 

This is clearly an administration that is making up justifications for its draconian policies as it goes. Whether it’s habeas corpus or birthright citizenship, this administration will look Americans in the eye and lie, over and over again, until their version of events is taken as truth. 

The president unveiled his designs for a “Golden Dome” defense system Tuesday, promising that the massive missile defense sytem—modeled on Israel’s “Iron Dome”—would protect America from international threats.

But when asked by a reporter whether military leaders actually want this supposed upgrade, Donald Trump couldn’t explain himself.

“Have military commanders asked for this system specifically?” asked a reporter. “Because [North American Aerospace Defense Command] had said previously that the current system was adequate, so what does this get the United States that isn’t already—”

“Somebody said the current system is adequate? There really is no current system,” the commander in chief interrupted. “We have certain areas of missiles and missile defense, but there’s no system. We just have some very capable weapons.

“This is a—there’s never been something like this, this is something that’s going to be very protective. Rest assured there won’t be anything like this, nobody else could be capable of building it, either,” Trump said.

The reporter then asked again if the military had actually asked for the space-based missile defense system, to which Trump replied that he had suggested it and military leaders “loved the idea.”

“It’s the way it’s got to be, right?” Trump said, leaning over the Resolute Desk.

Trump requested that Congress appropriate $25 billion in its most recent tax bill to get his Golden Dome dream off the ground, claiming that a final price tag would waver around $175 billion on a projected three-year timeline. But those numbers fall far below what the Congressional Budget Office calculated. Last month, the congressional analysis group estimated that the space-based components of the plan alone would cost more than half a trillion dollars over the next 20 years.

“It’s amazing how easy this one is to fund,” Trump said Tuesday, sounding exceedingly confident that he would be able to secure money for the project from Congress, days after Republicans lapsed on his reconciliation bill for being too expensive. “People actually love it.”

The gold-obsessed real estate developer formally plotted out his Golden Dome idea in a January 27 executive order, throwing the responsibility on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to figure out the details. But since then, critics have wondered if the massively expensive program would cut into funding for America’s preexisting defense programs, including an Air Force project replacing 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles from the 1970s with updated versions.

The Trump administration’s economic plan has dashed America’s credit score, rocking the nation’s lending reputation. And experts warn this could be the beginning of the end.

Credit firm Moody’s downgraded the nation’s score Friday, reporting that it appears increasingly unlikely that the U.S. economy will be able to keep up with its rising debt and interest payments, rattling what was once an unshakable confidence in U.S. growth.

Major international lending entities, such as Deutsche Bank, viewed the score drop as just another indicator that time is running out on solving America’s national debt.

“Yesterday felt like we were somewhere along the line of a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ with regards to the U.S. fiscal situation,” Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid wrote, in a note obtained by Fortune Tuesday. “Hard to know where in that thousand we are but probably much nearer a thousand than at zero even as yesterday saw an initial sell-off reverse as the session went on.

“At the end of the day the loss of the final U.S. triple-A rating late on Friday night doesn’t change anything much immediately but it keeps the drip, drip, drip of poor fiscal news building up against the debt sustainability dam in the background.”

Ratings from Moody’s and other firms inform companies and groups both foreign and domestic regarding how much they need to pay in order to borrow money.

Moody’s was the last of the three major bond-rating agencies to downgrade America’s formerly spotless score, signaling that the nation is a bigger credit risk than it has been in decades. It also indicates that the time in which the U.S. could borrow seemingly infinite sums of money—without the risk of inflation—is coming to a close.

America’s national debt is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing.

The Trump administration, however, has not yet looked inward for an explanation to the sour score. Instead, it has pushed blame onto the Biden administration, claiming that Republicans are still working overtime to trim the national deficit while they push forward a reconciliation package that would add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt to afford tax cuts for multimillionaires and corporations.

“I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration,” top White House economist Stephen Miran told reporters Monday. “We’re determined to bring it down and to undo the damage to the fiscal health of the United States that was wrought by the Biden administration and its reckless policies.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, meanwhile, brushed off the score downgrade as a “lagging indicator” of U.S. performance, urging investors to disregard the news.

Trump enacted his sweeping tariff plan in order to offset the jaw-droppingly expensive extension to his 2017 tax cuts, but America has yet to see any gains from the economic agenda. Instead, the tariffs have destabilized American markets while simultaneously undermining U.S. dominance in the global economy.

Whether or not the deficit actually affects the economy is still in debate. But having investors believe in the health of the economy is critical.

“The government deficit isn’t a problem until investors think it is,” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, told Axios Monday. “And they’re increasingly telling us that the deficit is a problem.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio flippantly said he does not have to listen to court orders at a Senate hearing Tuesday.

Senator Chris Van Hollen asked Rubio about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador on the government’s own admission. Rubio repeated the Trump administration’s false claims of Abrego Garcia’s gang membership and alleged crimes.

“We deported gang members. Gang members, including the one you had a margarita with. And that guy is a human trafficker, and that guy is a gang banger, and the evidence is going to be clear in the days to come,” Rubio said, referring to Van Hollen’s visit to El Salvador last month to verify Abrego Garcia’s well-being.

Van Hollen interrupted and tried to refute Rubio’s lies, telling Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch that Rubio “can’t make unsubstantiated claims like that.”

“Secretary Rubio should take that testimony to federal court in the United States because he hasn’t done it under oath,” Van Hollen asserted, only to be reprimanded by Risch. Then Rubio made his outrageous claim about the federal judiciary.

“There is a division in our government between the federal branch and the judicial branch. No judge, and the judicial branch, cannot tell me or the president how to conduct foreign policy,” Rubio said. “No judge can tell how I have to outreach to a foreign partner or what I need to say to them. And if do reach to that foreign partner and talk to them, I am under no obligation to share that with the judiciary branch.”

First of all, Rubio completely gets the branches of government wrong, as there are three of them: the executive branch, consisting of the presidency; the legislative branch, comprising Congress; and the judicial branch, made up of the federal court system. But perhaps even more troubling, Rubio also declared that he did not believe in the Constitution’s separation of powers, in which the three branches exist together in a system of checks and balances.

Rubio betrayed what seems to be the Trump administration’s actual beliefs about the U.S. government: that the presidency is more like an absolute monarchy that isn’t subject to congressional or judicial oversight. The conservative-controlled Supreme Court seems to have inspired that belief last year in its ruling on presidential immunity. Now, as President Trump deports immigrants without evidence or due process, we are seeing the actions of a president who believes he is above the law.