Judge Blasts Trump Officials, Hints at Contempt Over Deportation

A federal judge blasted Trump administration officials Tuesday for dragging their heels on complying with his order to facilitate the return of wrongly deported immigrant Ahmed Soliman and hinted at possible contempt charges.

The government responded hours later with a mandated status report that, while falling short of what U.S. District Court Judge John C. Hinderaker had asked it to provide, offered the clearest view yet of the remaining hurdles and set a tentative return date for Soliman of November 4.

The furious order—and its somewhat chastened response—comes a week after increasingly brazen evasions and deceptions from immigration officials and government attorneys in the case.

“Every day of the government’s noncompliance continues and compounds Ahmed’s mental and physical anguish,” Dana Camilleri, one of Soliman’s attorneys, told the Prospect. “We are gratified that Judge Hinderaker recognized that while the government played word games in its status reports, Ahmed continues to be held prisoner by the very people that tortured him.”

The case could have far-reaching consequences for the estimated 25,000 immigrants subjected to third-country removal so far in President Donald Trump’s second term.

Soliman, a 31-year-old Arizona man who came to the United States when he was four, was expelled in April to Equatorial Guinea, a country he had never been to, where he has been imprisoned without charge and repeatedly beaten, held at gunpoint, threatened, and deprived of food, water, and medical care. Hinderaker, a Trump appointee based in Arizona, ordered the government to facilitate Soliman’s return to the U.S. on October 6, ruling that his Fifth Amendment right to due process had been violated.

For the first two weeks following his decision, Judge Hinderaker had ordered weekly status reports from the government on the steps taken to facilitate Soliman’s return. But on October 21, after receiving a delayed report from a low-level ICE official whose “facilitating” amounted to sending an email to a colleague, the judge increased the frequency of status reports to daily. He also ordered the reports to include more specific information on actions taken, which he said should come from someone with personal knowledge.

The following day, the status report came from the same low-level official and, while a little more detailed, still did not comply with all of Judge Hinderaker’s instructions. The official also addressed a story from the Prospect about an ICE-chartered plane scheduled to land in Equatorial Guinea the next day, which Soliman’s attorneys had submitted into the record. The official claimed they had been informed by ICE’s Enforcement and Removals Operations that the “mission” had been canceled and, thus, could not be used to return Soliman to the U.S.

The next morning, the plane landed in Equatorial Guinea.

Soliman’s attorneys again attached a story from the Prospect about the landing to an emergency request to ground the plane until Soliman could be placed on it. By the time the judge responded, it had already taken off, but he ordered the next status report be “made under penalty of perjury by an individual with personal knowledge” and answer why the plane had landed anyway and why Soliman couldn’t have been placed on it.

This time, the response came from what appears to be the low-level official’s supervisor, who admitted the ICE-chartered plane had landed in Equatorial Guinea, saying that the “mission” had changed from a third-country removal to a regular deportation, without explaining why exactly that rendered the aircraft “not available” to facilitate Soliman’s return. The official also left out that the other two stops on the trip, to Burundi and the Central African Republic, were third-country removals. In any case, he said, Soliman couldn’t have been put on board because he didn’t have the proper identification and travel documents.

Soliman told the Prospect in a September interview that during the ICE flight to Equatorial Guinea six months ago, he repeatedly asked to see his identification and travel documents, before ICE officials finally admitted they didn’t have any for him. The government later said ICE had used the pilot’s manifest—a receipt with the names of all passengers and crew on a flight—as his “travel document.” Why a pilot’s manifest could not be used again to return Soliman remains unanswered.

Before Judge Hinderaker had a chance to respond to the Friday status report, the government appealed to the Ninth Circuit, asking for an emergency stay on his order—a maneuver that has worked well for the Trump administration at the Supreme Court, in a larger case challenging the entire third-country removal scheme.

No stay had been granted though by Monday afternoon, when the government had to file another status report, which again came from the low-level ICE official, this time announcing that one of the necessary travel documents had been issued. The document expired November 11, and the plan was now to put Soliman on a commercial flight, the report said.

Government attorneys also asked the judge to change the status reports to every other business day, since they had “demonstrated significant movement,” even though that movement only came after weeks of delays and deception.

Judge Hinderaker smacked down the request, and then some, on Tuesday. While acknowledging the “one step completed,” he unloaded a four-page laundry list of all the ways the government had either unreasonably delayed or just plain not complied with his instructions.

They had not addressed why they had delayed ordering the travel documents; they had not yet begun the process of issuing other documents they could have ordered weeks earlier; they had not addressed when they knew about the charter flight to Equatorial Guinea or why it hadn’t been used, or why none of a handful of ICE-chartered aircraft in the region during the previous weeks had been used; and they had not even contacted Soliman, when reporting on his physical condition was one the first tasks they were supposed to complete in the original October 6 order.

The judge was not moving to hold ICE officials in contempt “at this time,” he said, but was listing all of the unmet orders in case “it becomes necessary to revisit the question.”

He also pointed out that “no commercial flight itinerary, travel date, route, carrier, or United States port of entry has been finalized. It does not state where Plaintiff is, what his physical condition is, or whether any United States official has spoken with him.”

There were still 11 more steps to complete before Soliman could be returned “[b]ased on Defendants’ own submissions,” Judge Hinderaker said, issuing a new November 11 deadline.

“With a fixed expiration date approaching and eleven steps still outstanding, the need for daily reporting has increased, not diminished,” the judge said.

Once again, Judge Hinderaker issued even more specific instructions for what an official with “personal knowledge” needed to address in the government’s next status report.

Late Tuesday, the same low-level ICE official submitted another status report that did not meet the judge’s order, tentatively setting Soliman’s return date for November 4, with some potentially large issues with the embassy and the Equatorial Guinean government looming.

The report also said ERO had advised “no ICE charter is currently planned and that a charter if one became available, would likely occur” after November 11.

Public flight data shows an ICE charter flight is scheduled to fly to West Africa out of Arizona Wednesday afternoon.