The Trump administration is planning to deport immigrants to Libya, using a military plane in a disturbing and arbitrary escalation of its mass deportation efforts. The deportations could begin as early as Wednesday, though the immigrants’ nationalities remain unclear.
Libya’s situation is so volatile that the State Department warns U.S. citizens against traveling there, citing “crime, terrorism, unexploded land mines, civil unrest, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”
Conditions in the detention centers these migrants would face are even worse. A 2021 Amnesty International investigation revealed “horrific violations,” describing the prisons as a “hellscape.” Diana Eltahaway, the organization’s Middle East deputy director, emphasized that detainees are “immediately funneled into arbitrary detention and systematically subjected to torture, sexual violence, forced labor, and other exploitation with total impunity.… The entire network of Libyan migration detention centers is rotten to its core and must be dismantled.”
This decision follows months after the administration controversially sent Venezuelan immigrants to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador—an extrajudicial move still under legal scrutiny.
