The Trump Administration has decided to deport some criminal immigrants who are from countries to which the US doesn’t usually deport people to South Sudan which has agreed to accept them.
Trump Administration Poised to Ramp Up Deportations to Distant Countries
Eight men sent by the United States to South Sudan could presage a new approach to Trump-era deportations, even as critics say the practice could amount to “enforced disappearance.”
By Mattathias Schwartz, NYT, July 13, 2025
Here are the various deportees sent to Sudan, with their native countries: A look at the deportees on plane that headed for South Sudan from US, AP, July 17, 2025
- LAOS: Thongxay Nilakout
- MYANMAR: Kyaw Mya
- MYANMAR: Nyo Myint
- VIETNAM: Tuan Thanh Phan
- CUBA: Enrique Arias-Hierro
- CUBA: Jose Manuel Rodriguez-Quinones
- MEXICO: Jesus Munoz-Gutierrez
And one guy who’s actually from…SOUTH SUDAN: Dian Peter Domach.
Their crimes include robbery, murder, sexually abusing a child under 12 years of age, sexually assaulting (and impregnating) a 26-year-old woman with “diminished mental capacity,” first-degree murder and second-degree assault, robbery, kidnapping, arson, and second-degree murder.
The reason they’re not (except for the Sudanese) being deported to their native countries is that they’re dictatorships, Communist dictatorships in the case of Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, an on again-off again military dictatorship in the case of Myanmar (formerly Burma). The US lets in refugees FROM these countries—which is no doubt how some of the deportees got to the US, this is not about illegal immigration—rather than deporting people TO them.
Oddly enough, this is something I personally suggested almost a quarter of century ago—when George W. Bush was President of the US, and Vicente Fox was President of Mexico—on VDARE.com in an article called Dear Mr. Fox: Please Find Attached our Poor/ Tired/ Dispossessed, Etc., March 8, 2001.
Here’s what I wrote, rewritten for the 2020s:
It’s one of those Emma Lazarus myths that immigration to the U.S. has ever been significantly composed of refugees. But it is true that individual refugees have been coming to America for all of its history, from the Pilgrim Fathers to France’s Edmond Genêt and Hungary’s Louis Kossuth.
In many cases it seems to be a choice of sending a refugee back to, say, Afghanistan where he will be persecuted or keeping him in America where he will persecute Americans. People who committed crime in America, but come from places the US won’t sent them back to are Sentenced to a Life in Limbo as a 1998 LA Times article put it.
But there’s another option for dealing with refugees. They can be assisted to move to other, third, countries, where they won’t be persecuted.
The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration has an almost four billion dollar annual budget which would buy a lot of plane tickets, definitely a net saving of taxpayer dollars.
Hindu refugees from the Taliban can be helped to go to India or to Fiji, where there is a large Hindu community. (Too large already, say the native Fijians, but that’s just “nativism.”) Afghan Muslim refugees from the Taliban can be sent to any the many places in Central Asia ending in ‘stan. Indian Christian refugees from Hindus can go to Spain or England, depending on their brand of Christianity.
There’s a place for everybody.
You might think that other countries might object to this influx of refugees, but you’re forgetting the widespread belief that immigration always benefits a country. In 2001 I wrote that “There was a big piece about it in USA Today the other day,” but there are always articles about immigration is somehow good for the receiving country.
That means, in effect, that the US has been historically selfish in hanging onto the “poor, tired, and dispossessed” thus depriving other countries of these immigrant entrepreneurs.
Many of the prospective receiving countries have vacancies. The other day, I overheard a Filipino woman say that her family had built a new house near Manila but now had nobody to live in it. Her whole family is in either Canada or the US. The Mexican border region is rapidly becoming depopulated.
Which is one more reason that we can expect that the current President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, once the benefits of immigration are explained to her (and the Cato Institute has already translated their arguments into Spanish), will have no problem with a large Somalian influx.
If she does, we can always start a smear campaign against her, calling her a “racist,” a “xenophobe,” a “nativist,” and any other nasty epithet that seem[s] to fit. This strategy has been very effective in the United States.
The Danger of Claudia Sheinbaum – Director’s Editorial
Alternatively, we could just drop the refugees off at the border and tell them to head south. That strategy has been highly effective in Mexico.
I don’t really think that this will be adopted as policy, partly because it makes too much sense. I suspect that many refugee-friendly immigration enthusiasts are less interested in saving refugee lives than in the “transformation of America.”
That is to say that they’re not interested in making refugees’ lives better but in making Americans’ lives worse.
It’s the socialist idea that we should all share, whether we like sharing or not. If America has riches, give them away. If the Third World has misery, import it.
I’m simply suggesting that refugees can be exported as well.
Trump could call it “Foreign Aid.”