Homeland Security said it’s holding eight illegal immigrants in a shipping container at an American military base in the African country of Djibouti after a federal judge last month halted their deportation and ordered the government to give them more “due process.”
The detainees and ICE officers assigned to guard them are getting sick with respiratory infections, and they risk rocket attacks from rebels in Yemen as they try to carry out the judge’s orders, the administration said in new court filings Thursday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has struggled to get enough officers into Djibouti to guard the migrants, all of whom have serious criminal records involving murder and sex.
“The aliens are currently being held in a conference room in a converted Conex shipping container on the U.S. naval base in Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti. This has been identified as the only viable place to house the aliens,” Mellissa Harper, a senior ICE official, told the court.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, after ruling that the government violated the migrants’ rights with their speedy deportations to a country they had no ties to, gave the feds a choice of bringing them back to the U.S. for full due process or finding a way to deliver it overseas.
Faced with the optics of bringing back people it declared major security risks, the Trump administration opted to try to create detention and hearing space at the military base.
But it’s proved tricky, Ms. Harper admitted in the court filing.
She said temperatures regularly soar past 100 degrees during the day, and the base’s trash and human waste are disposed of in burn pits that operate at night just miles from the base, creating a nasty smog cloud that has left officers and detainees with what appears to be bacterial infections.
They’re taking medication, but it’s not clear how long the supply will last, Ms. Harper said.
Initially just three ICE officers — the ones on the plane — guarded the eight migrants. They’ve been rotated out, and a new detail of 11 officers is working in 12-hour shifts to guard the men.
They have to march migrants to a separate restroom facility, do pat-downs for each trip and generally confine them to the shipping container, which is itself a problem, Ms. Harper said.
“The conference room in which the aliens are housed is not equipped nor suitable for detention of any length, let alone for the detention of high-risk individuals. Notably, the room has none of the security apparatus necessary for the detention of criminal aliens. If an altercation were to occur, there is no other location on site available to separate the aliens, which further compromises the officers’ safety,” she said.
The ICE officers are sleeping in a trailer with three sets of bunk beds, and each is assigned a single locker. Some sleep with N-95 masks to try to limit damage from the burn pit smog.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.