3 Migrants Beat the Trump Administration in Court. They Got Deported the Next Day

The future looked bright for Luis Eduardo Perez Parra, Leonel Rivas Gonzalez and Abrahan Josue Barrios last week.

After being held in immigration custody for over a year and facing the possibility of transfer to Guantánamo Bay, the three men asked a federal court to intervene, warning they might have “disappeared into the legal black hole” of Guantánamo.

Last Sunday, a federal judge in New Mexico handed down a surprise ruling blocking the Trump administration from sending the men to Guantánamo — the first successful legal challenge to the policy since it was enacted last month.

But their victory was short-lived.

The very next day, the men were placed on the first deportation flight back to Venezuela in over a year, according to their lawyer Jessica Vosburgh.

“It’s hard to imagine that it didn’t have something to do with them filing a habeas petition and then stepping forward to challenge these threatened Guantanamo transfers,” Vosburgh told ABC News. “The court’s order only applied to transfers to Guantánamo, this is just a slap in the face to get deported the next day.”

While Vosburgh stopped short of calling the deportations retaliatory, she said she struggles to see what else could have led to the sudden deportation.

{snip}