The White House is releasing information this week on the violent migrants the administration has returned to South Sudan under President Donald Trump.
The newest deportations came after a federal court determined that U.S. officials must keep custody and control of the migrants in case it rules that their removals were illegal later. The judgment was announced late Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy in Massachusetts during an emergency hearing.
Attorneys representing the immigrants claimed the Trump administration seemed to begin deporting people from Burma and Vietnam to South Sudan despite a court order that limited deportation to third-party nations.
According to the Daily Mail, among the migrants transferred to the East African country are at least five murderers and one pedophile. Only one is a South Sudanese citizen; the rest are from Cuba, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos.
They include Thongxay Nilakout of Burma, convicted of murder after the high-profile 1994 death of German tourist Gisela Pfleger in California.
He was imprisoned for life in California in 1996 and apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in January of this year before being sent to South Sudan.
A US official referred to Nilakout and the others as “bad hombres.”
They also included Nyo Myint, a Burmese citizen. He was convicted of first-degree sexual assault with a victim who was mentally and physically incapable of resisting and sentenced to 12 years in prison. ICE apprehended him on February 19, 2025.
Judge Murphy, appointed by President Joe Biden, stated that the US government must “maintain custody and control of class members currently being removed to South Sudan or any other third country, to ensure the practical feasibility of return if the Court finds that such removals were unlawful.”
While the court left the specifics to the government’s discretion, he stated that the migrants “will be treated humanely.”
At the emergency session, lawyers for the refugees informed the judge that immigration officials may have transferred up to a dozen people from various nations to Africa.
They contend that this breaches a court ruling that states that persons must be given a “meaningful opportunity” to argue that being sent to a nation apart from their native country would endanger their safety.
🚨 @DHSgov conducted a diplomatic and military security operation to remove some of the MOST VIOLENT CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIENS from America.
Here are the worst the media won't cover ⬇️
Illegal alien Nyo Myint, convicted of sexual assault. Arrested by ICE on Feb. 19, 2025. pic.twitter.com/wu9DkP0O7w
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 21, 2025
Court filings show that an immigration officer in Texas acknowledged the apparent deportation of one man from Burma via email.
His lawyers say he was only briefed in English, which he doesn’t know well, and they learned of the plot hours before his deportation flight.
A lady also stated that her Vietnamese husband and up to ten others were taken to Africa on Tuesday morning, according to attorneys from the National Immigration Litigation Alliance.
The migrants’ attorneys petitioned Murphy for an emergency court order to halt the deportations.
The judge already determined that any efforts to transfer individuals to Libya without warning would “obviously” breach his order.
He ordered Trump administration officials to appear at another emergency hearing on Wednesday to answer concerns regarding deporting immigrants to South Sudan and other nations.
Earlier this week, Trump scored a massive victory at the Supreme Court on immigration.
On Monday, the court lifted a lower court injunction that was preventing the president from stripping the protected legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants currently residing in the United States, Fox News reported.
The decision was 8 – 1 in favor of what the president wanted, with the only dissent coming from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom former President Joe Biden appointed.
“The decision clears the way for the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to terminate Biden-era Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protections for roughly 300,000 Venezuelan migrants living in the U.S. and allows the administration to move forward with plans to immediately remove these migrants, which lawyers for the administration argued they should be able to do,” the report said.