Secretary of State Marco Rubio lashed out Friday at a federal judge who intervened to halt the deportation of a planeload of sex offenders and murders, saying his meddling has done severe damage to U.S. foreign policy, is hurting America’s humanitarian mission and even sparked new fighting in Libya.
Mr. Rubio, in a striking statement to Judge Brian Murphy, said the judge’s intervention this week upended the U.S. government’s quiet diplomatic efforts with South Sudan, Libya and Djibouti, interfered with counter-terrorism operations in Africa and could make it tougher to deliver humanitarian aid to eastern part of the continent.
Libya, which had been secretly negotiating with the U.S. to take deportees, has now had to publicly reject the idea. And the judge’s action emboldened rebel forces in Libya, igniting the worst street fighting in three years in the capital, Tripoli, Mr. Rubio said.
The unrest also set back negotiations on an energy deal between Libya and a U.S. company, Mr. Rubio said.
The scolding marked a massive escalation in the Trump administration’s battle with federal judges, serving as major reinforcements in the government’s claim that judges are meddling in issues they have no business in.
Judge Murphy this week rushed to try to derail deportations of a planeload of convicted major felons, many of them murderers, that the U.S. sent to South Sudan, with the possibility of transferring elsewhere.
Homeland Security officials said the migrants were so vicious that their home countries had refused to take them back and it took tricky diplomacy just to line up the flight to South Sudan.
Judge Murphy, though, said he feared the felons’ rights were violated, as was his own injunction aimed at the government. He ordered Homeland Security to maintain custody of the migrants overseas and offer them new hearings to see if they deserved to come back to the U.S.
“Based on what I have learned, I don’t see how anybody could say these individuals had a meaningful opportunity to object,” said Judge Murphy, who was appointed to the bench by former President Biden.
The government has repeatedly told the courts that they are interfering with foreign policy matters the Constitution leaves to the president. That reared its head in the flap over the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador in March, for example.
But Mr. Rubio peeled the curtain back to an unprecedented extent Friday, laying bare a wide range of consequences for the judge’s rulings.
The secretary said the judge’s orders meant that the high-level deportees on the plane were required to temporarily remain at America’s only African military base, in Djibouti. That created a wrinkle with that nation’s government and interfered with ongoing counter-terrorism operations, Mr. Rubio said.
In South Sudan, the secretary says the judge’s rulings have upended the careful diplomacy that had gotten that country to accept the deportees in the first place — including one of its own citizens who was on the plane. And the ramifications run deeper still.
He said South Sudan is a critical location for U.S. humanitarian relief, and anything that hurts cooperation with that government hurts those efforts.
“It is almost certain the court’s interjection will result in delayed or significantly reduced humanitarian efforts,” Mr. Rubio said.
In another court filing Friday U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the judge’s ruling will cost the government money because it gives some illegal immigrants new rights of appeal, meaning they have to be held in custody for at least 25 days longer.
“The process imposed by the court creates a vicious cycle that would require ICE to relitigate enforceable removal orders when attempting to remove aliens who have no right to remain in the United States, but hail from countries who refuse to cooperate with the acceptance of their criminal citizens,” said Garrett Ripa, a senior ICE official.
He also said ICE has to get travel documents for every deportee flown out, and they are only good for a short period of time. The judge’s ordered delays could force ICE to restart the process, “wasting” time and money — or forcing “dangerous criminals” to be released into communities.
In yet another filing, the government provided the judge with detailed criminal histories for the people he has ordered not to be deported.
That included a Laotian man who robbed and killed a 64-year-old German tourist; a Mexican man who stabbed his roommate to death and has been tied to a gang; and a Burmese man who was convicted of repeatedly sexually assaulting a child starting when the victim was 7 years old, and up to when she was 12.
