Senate President Francis Escudero yesterday condemned the United States’ plan to send Asian immigrants, including Filipinos, facing deportation to Libya, calling it “cruel.”
A US federal judge however temporarily halted the deportations of Asian migrants, ruling that sending them to Libya would violate a prior ruling allowing them to contest their removal.
This move is part of a broader initiative of U.S. immigration authorities to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, in line with President Donald Trump’s campaign promise.
“Filipinos are not camels to be dumped on some Libyan desert. They are human beings who deserve to be accorded all the rights by a state who claims to cherish and uphold them,” he said in a statement.
“If the United States wants to deport our citizens, then we are willing to welcome our kababayan back. There is absolutely no need for this cruelty to export them to a third country,” he asserted.
He called for the Philippine Ambassador to the U.S. Jose Manuel Romualdez to investigate the status of Filipinos facing deportation and provide legal assistance if needed.
Escudero stressed the importance of protecting the rights of those at risk of deportation, ensuring they are not subjected to persecution in countries with a history of human rights violations.
“Dignified repatriation of our brothers and sisters is all we seek, not some rendition to an offshore penitentiary in a country which does not want them,” he concluded.
District Judge Brian Murphy said such deportations would violate his previous order that migrants being sent to a country other than their own first be given a “meaningful” opportunity to challenge their removal in court and show that they may face persecution.
Murphy’s ruling came in response to an emergency motion from lawyers for migrants from Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam who said they were in “imminent” danger of being deported to Libya—”a county notorious for its human rights violations.”
“The allegedly imminent removals, as reported by news agencies,” the judge said, “would clearly violate this Court’s Order.”
“The Department of Homeland Security may not evade this injunction by ceding control over non-citizens or the enforcement of its immigration responsibilities to any other agency, including but not limited to the Department of Defense,” Murphy added.
Trump campaigned for the White House on a pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants and invoked an obscure wartime law in March to summarily deport alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.
Federal judges have since blocked further deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was last used to round up Japanese-American citizens during World War II.
Libya’s Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU) denied meanwhile that it had reached a deal with Washington to take in migrants expelled from the United States.
“Parallel entities, not subject to legitimacy, could be involved in agreements that do not represent the Libyan state and do not commit it legally or politically,” it said in a statement.
Libya is split between the UN-recognized GNU in the west and a rival administration backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar that rules from Benghazi and Tobruk in the east.
The eastern government’s foreign ministry on Wednesday also issued a statement “denying the existence of any agreement or understanding concerning the settlement of migrants of any nationality.”
Libya has been gripped by unrest since the 2011 overthrow and killing of longtime ruler Moamer Kadhafi. With AFP
Editor’s Note: This is an updated article. Originally posted with the headline: “Escudero hits ‘cruel’ US deportation of Filipino, other Asian migrants to Libya”
