Trump Looks to Libya in His Latest Deportation Scheme
A judge has halted the plan, but only a fool would believe the threat is now over.
“Don’t Open for ICE!” poster on a bridge over Los Angeles River, near the Frogtown/Ellysian Valley neighborhood of Los Angeles, on April, 30, 2025.
(Citizen of the Planet / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)Earlier this week, Trump officials let it be known that they were readying a military flight, filled with immigrants, to send to Libya. Questions quickly arose, like, who would be deported? The government wasn’t saying. Immigration lawyers subsequently said the people who had been informed they would be sent to Libya were from Vietnam, Laos, and the Philippines, among other countries.
And, who had signed on to the deal? After all, there are two rival governments in Libya and a slew of militias that also have political pretensions and control some proportion of the country’s land. It soon became apparent that no even remotely legitimate Libyan authority had given the nod to the deportation plan. Indeed, within a day of the initial rumors, both governments—the UN-recognized one in the west, and the strongman-led one in the east, controlled by militia leader Khalifa Haftar—had denied entering into an agreement with the United States to house deported migrants. So, too, other leading militias denied that they had approved the deal.
It also became clear that, regardless of whether anyone in Libya had approved of the military flights, this would become a lightning-rod issue, similar to the government’s deportation of migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT. Perhaps even more so than El Salvador, Libya has an abysmal human rights record, and would-be immigrants face appalling, and frequently deadly, conditions in the country’s web of immigrant detention centers.
America wouldn’t be the first country to dump migrants into Libya; the European Union has long paid Libya to intercept migrants hoping to travel from sub-Saharan Africa north across the Mediterranean and on to Europe. Human rights groups have documented numerous atrocities in the detention camps in which these migrants often end up. These range from torture and rape to executions. In some instances, migrants were apparently sold into slavery.
In 2023, the UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya found credible evidence of widespread crimes against humanity in the country, which has been riven by civil war for more than a decade. These included torture, human trafficking, executions, children being forced to serve in one or another rival military force, sexual violence, violence against members of the LGBTQ community, and restrictions on workers’ rights of association. In 2017, film footage surfaced of young migrants from sub-Saharan Africa being auctioned off in open-air slave markets. The purchase price for each slave was reported to be in the $400 range.
Last year, the US State Department noted the “life-threatening” conditions of prisons in Libya. Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières have each documented the awful conditions of prisons and immigrant detention centers in the war-ravaged country.
There is literally no legitimate reason for the Trump regime to send migrants in the US to Libya. Legal experts believe it would violate the Convention Against Torture and the Refugee Convention. In fact, the only conceivable rationales for sending immigrants to Libya are, first, to destroy the lives of those who had the temerity to seek sanctuary in the US; and, second, to instill the fear of God into others thinking about migrating to the US. It’s in the same vein as the deportations to CECOT, as well as the proposals that have been floating around to deport migrants to Rwanda, a country that the UK, under the conservative government that was in power until last year, also tried to deport asylum seekers to; it’s of a piece with the rumors that Trump’s people attempted to strong-arm Ukraine into accepting US flights of migrants.
All of this is literally the mirror opposite of Emma Lazarus’s stirring vision in her poem “The New Colossus,” etched into the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
The Trump–Stephen Miller message to immigrants is dramatically darker: Dare to enter the US without a valid visa to try to claim asylum, or overstay your visa while simply dreaming of a future without dire poverty and constant fear of violence and—domestic laws and international law notwithstanding—you will be sent, as a prisoner, into some of the most dangerous countries and environments on earth. That’s about as pure a distillation of the concept of sadism as any I have ever encountered. It violates every international treaty and law on the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers, and it furthers the notion that America is looking to build a gulag archipelago, stretched out across multiple countries, for undocumented immigrants whom it is looking to expel.
On Wednesday, a judge in Massachusetts put a temporary hold on the government’s Libya plan. But only a fool would think the threat is now over. Trump 2.0 has its heart set on deporting immigrants into harm’s way, and, courts or no courts, it will seek ways to do so.
In Trump 1.0, the hatred was more scattershot, as were the “solutions.” For example, Trump called for migrants crossing the southern border to be shot in the legs; he also queried his team about the possibility of filling the Rio Grande, or a man-made moat along the border, with alligators, to discourage migrant crossing. Neither of those ghastly proposals ultimately went anywhere. This time around, the extremism is even more widespread. But it is also far more methodical. Having devoted much of its political capital to demonizing immigrants, it is itching to come up with the next headline-generating atrocity against these vulnerable individuals.
This isn’t, in any meaningful way, a government of, for, and by the people. Instead, it’s an edifice built on public displays of cruelty. We’ve seen this before. Let’s not mince words: It’s the spectacle of the iron boot.
Support independent journalism that does not fall in line
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic—and civilians around the world—and shine a bright light on the truth.
The Nation’s experienced team of writers, editors, and fact-checkers understands the scale of what we’re up against and the urgency with which we have to act. That’s why we’re publishing critical reporting and analysis of the war on Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.
But this journalism is possible only with your support.
This March, The Nation needs to raise $50,000 to ensure that we have the resources for reporting and analysis that sets the record straight and empowers people of conscience to organize. Will you donate today?
