Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2025

Front Burner Transcript for July 30, 2025

Guest Host: Allie Jaynes

ALLIE JAYNES: Hi, I'm Allie Jaynes, in for Jayme Poisson.

[Music: Theme]

AJ: This month, two flights landed in the African nations of South Sudan and Eswatini, transporting migrants from U.S. prisons who, for the most part, have no connection to these countries. In at least one of these cases, migrants were told that they would be transported to a detention facility in the United States, and instead were taken to a prison located nearly 10,000 kilometres away from the U.S. Now, this decision to deport groups of people in American prisons against their will to detention camps in nations they have never visited, marks a radical and unprecedented shift in American policy. Legal experts say it might well be unconstitutional. It's also probably worth noting that we have talked a lot about ICE on this show over the past few months, and, although little is known in many of their cases, more than 50 Canadians are being held in the custody of ICE, many of whom were arrested unexpectedly amid Trump's immigration crackdown. At least one Canadian has died in an ICE detention facility. Hamed Aleaziz is an immigration reporter with The New York Times, and he joins us for a conversation about the offshoring of immigration detention and two notorious facilities at the centre of Trump's immigration detention plan: 'American Siberia' and 'Alligator Alcatraz.'

[Music: Theme]

AJ: Hi, Hamed. Thanks so much for being here.

HAMED ALEAZIZ: Thank you for having me.

AJ: So let's begin with this story of eight men in ICE custody who were told that they were about to board a flight from a detention facility in Texas to one in Louisiana. And hours later, they landed on a U.S. military base in the East African nation of Djibouti. They were held there for weeks, legs shackled, in shipping containers. Before we get into their eventual destination, can you just walk me through the series of events which sees a group of men in the custody of ICE sent to a military base on the other side of the world?

HAMED ALEAZIZ: Yeah. This was a really remarkable moment in American immigration history in the modern era. You know, the Trump administration has been focused on trying to deport people to countries, uh, that are not their own. And this is an effort, ultimately a deterrence, trying to encourage people, not only to not enter the country illegally, but to, if they are in the country illegally in America, to self-deport, to leave. This is in many ways in support of that. So when we get to the situation with these eight men, it's important to point out that they're from Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam. There's only one man who's from South Sudan. And pretty quickly they realize, these men in ICE custody, that they are being sent to South Sudan. There is a lawsuit that is filed in federal court in Massachusetts, pretty much essentially as this plane is heading on its way to South Sudan.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: This morning, a federal judge is ordering the Trump administration to maintain custody of deportees allegedly being sent to countries they are not from, including war-torn South Sudan. Judge Brian Murphy...

HAMED ALEAZIZ: And in this court hearing, which is, you know, one of the most remarkable hearings that I've ever heard of, where the judge is asking the government's lawyers, what is the final destination of this plane? And the government lawyers are like, well, we can't tell you. This is a government secret, this is classified. This isn't information that we can, that we can share. It really kicked off the beginning of a very bizarre and intense saga for these men and for the immigration system.

AJ: Mm. Right. Because I mean, that court case you're talking about, if I'm understanding correctly, this was like, a federal judge intervened using a ruling that cited a previous injunction requiring the Trump administration to give deportees advanced notice of their destination and what they called a meaningful chance to object if they believed that they'd be in danger of harm. Which, like, it doesn't sound like they were actually given that. So, so how were the ICE officials able to kind of circumvent that?

HAMED ALEAZIZ: Well, what the judge said was that those individuals needed to remain in U.S. custody, which is why they ended up in Djibouti at that military base; and that those individuals needed to be given a screening for potential fear they had to be deported to South Sudan; and if they failed that screening, even more time to appeal. And I think the one thing that this administration is trying to do is, then they said, you know, openly, is to deport as many people as possible. And what stands in the way of a mass deportation campaign is process, is time, is weeks on end for appeals. This is something that the administration was, you know, fighting against. And ultimately, they made their case to the Supreme Court where they won. And they were allowed to, at least for now, continue with these third-country deportations without needing this extensive process. That the judge's ruling was no longer going to be holding them, you know, under this threat of needing to provide people with a lot of time to stop their deportations.

AJ: Can you tell me more about this Third Country policy and the rationale for it?

HAMED ALEAZIZ: Yeah, it's, it's a little complicated. Um, let's just-- just stepping back for a second. ICE has long had an issue, regardless of administration, with deporting people to certain countries. I'm thinking of countries like China, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, India. Some of them, America doesn't have formal diplomatic relations with. Others, countries don't hand out their travel documents for their nationals. They create all these different parameters. And it makes it very difficult for ICE to actually conduct deportation flights to these countries. So for a long time, ICE has been struggling with what to do with people who can't be deported to their home country. And in fact, they can't hold onto certain people for a long time without the actual realistic possibility of someone being deported. So it causes all these complications. And that's where you saw in the first Trump administration, they wanted to get more third countries involved, to send people to third countries that were not their own. But it wasn't necessarily in service of this complication that I mentioned. It was in fact a way to deter people from coming to America. So, you know, this was primarily folks coming from other Central American countries, being sent to Guatemala to, to claim asylum there. And in many ways, we've seen kind of somewhat of a continuation of that. In February, the administration deported hundreds of people to Costa Rica and Panama. These were people from countries that are typically harder to deport to, like Iran, China, Afghanistan and elsewhere. And it kind of seemed like, okay, maybe this is a new frontier on this third-country deportation effort. But since then, it's been a little bit tricky to, um, to understand. For example, like I said, you know, one of the people on this South Sudan flight is from Mexico, and Mexico has long taken thousands of their nationals. This is the country that, if I'm not mistaken, the United States deports the most people to. There's a very healthy relationship between Mexico and the United States. So that's one kind of confusing, um, part of this. But I think ultimately, it serves as a deterrent, I think. It serves as a notice to migrants that, you know, you can end up, you know, even if you're from Cuba, you can end up in Africa. Um, and it's better for you to leave the country on your own. In fact, I've heard this from folks. I was in a ICE processing centre in late May, and a Cuban man who had been arrested, I was talking to him. And he was aware of this flight to, um, that was destined for South Sudan. And he, you know, he-- you could tell he was concerned about it. So it's already kind of making a rippling effect in the communities.

[music]

AJ: Can you tell me a little bit more about these eight men? I mean, firstly, you know, what they were in prison for, but also, how either they or their families have reacted to this. I mean, I can only imagine this would be terrifying.

HAMED ALEAZIZ: These individuals had serious criminal histories. Um, you know, one family member of one of the individuals who was sent, uh, his name-- the individual who was deported, his name was Tuan Thanh Phan. And this was a man who had come to the United States at a very young age, at the age of nine, and he had actually been convicted of killing somebody in a gang altercation back when he was 18 years old. He ended up receiving a 25-year prison sentence. And as a result of that, he was ordered deported from the United States. And for his wife -- his wife that I spoke with, her name's Ngoc Phan -- she said that he was essentially open to returning to Vietnam. Yes, he'd been ordered deported. He-- This was not something that he, that he wanted. His hope was that after he served his prison sentence, he would be released into the United States. And the way she described it was that he had, you know, spent a lot of time in prison kind of preparing for the outside world and hoping to have a new start. And instead he was picked up by ICE, and he was taken to ICE detention with the thought that ICE was going to deport him. And I think ultimately this family realized, okay, he's going to be deported. And they planned on his deportation to Vietnam. They were getting his things together, getting like, you know, luggage together for him to take back to Vietnam. She was preparing her family in Vietnam to welcome him. They were talking about, you know, in the future, her moving there full time, but in the meantime, her kind of going back and forth between Vietnam and America. So there was a real push to focus on a life in Vietnam. Really, kind of in a way, what the United States wants is, if you've been ordered deported, to accept that and to go home and make a plan for yourself in your home country. And instead, you know, he's sent to South Sudan. And this was something that really, you know, shocked his wife, you know, was just a moment of fear, of... you know, she was just very, very scared. You know, she felt like her husband had been disappeared. Um. That was the, that was the experience we heard from somebody close to one of these detainees, was just a matter of shock, you know. Kind of like, how is this possible?

AJ: Mm-hmm. So since that Supreme Court decision, uh, earlier this month, we saw another very similar situation where five men, also convicted of crimes, were deported to the small African nation of Eswatini without their consent. My understanding is that opposition figures in Eswatini have, you know, they've described this as human trafficking disguised as a deportation program. A couple of them have said that the U.S. is using their country as a dump site. But obviously the government agreed to this. So why do you think governments in South Sudan or Eswatini would agree to be part of a program like this? Like, what do they get out of the deal?

HAMED ALEAZIZ: Well, with this administration, the state department, you know, all of these government agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, everyone's empowered to push the deportation campaign to try to get deals with countries, to have them take in other nationalities. And if there's any resistance, there can be a consequence.

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS PRESENTER: Well, the U.S. has announced that it's revoking all visas for South Sudanese passport holders and blocking new arrivals effective immediately. The Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the move is in response to the African nation refusing to accept the return of its repatriated citizens.

HAMED ALEAZIZ: And so, you see how very quickly if these nations are not going to be cooperative on immigration, there can be very clear consequences. And I think on the flip side, helping the Trump administration with their number one priority, no doubt puts these countries in a more favourable light, in a better spot with this administration.

[music]

AJ: So I want to pivot for a moment from this international conversation to talk about migrants who are being detained in the U.S. domestically. And in particular, there's this, uh, there's a couple facilities I'd love to talk about. And the first is one in Louisiana in this little country town called Jena -- I believe that the population is around 4,000 people. I've seen it described by one reporter in Slate as "American Siberia." So, talk to me about how this particular facility became a mainstay for ICE and why it is so infamous.

HAMED ALEAZIZ: Well, I would say that for the most part, ICE relies on their bigger facilities in the southern part of the United States, in states like Texas, Louisiana, and elsewhere, primarily because ICE detention has become a point of contention in more progressive communities, um, in states where these detention centres are no longer accepted. There have been laws passed to try to ban ICE detention in states. So increasingly, ICE has had to rely on detention centres in the south. And one of the issues with these detention centres, according to immigration advocates, is that they're so far away from legal access. And, you know, as opposed to places that are near big cities, some of the locations in the south are far away from a multitude of lawyers, and that creates a problem of an inability to access an attorney, which is essential for these migrants who are trying to fight their deportation cases.

AJ: Mm-hmm. Under this second Trump administration, we've heard hundreds of stories of people being essentially kidnapped off the street by ICE. We've heard of people being arrested at these almost entrapment-style immigration hearings, immigrants arrested even after their cases are dismissed. And we've also heard in some cases about American-born people being caught up in this ICE enforcement dragnet. So, you know, talk to me about who's being sent to this facility and what a person's chances are of getting out once they're in.

HAMED ALEAZIZ: Yeah. I mean, specifically on who is in the facility, I can't say as far as like what nationalities are there right now. That's not public information. But I would just say in general practice, ICE is willing to and has moved migrants from-- who've been arrested in one part of the country to another part of the country. So you will have people who've been arrested in Boston and New York and elsewhere who are sent to Louisiana. I mean, in fact, this is what happened in the case of some of the students, the international students who were arrested by ICE infamously earlier this year. They were sent to ICE detention facilities in the South, including in Louisiana.

AJ: If I'm not mistaken, Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist, was sent to this facility, right?

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS PRESENTER 2: Mahmoud Khalil is a Columbia University graduate. He was arrested by U.S. immigration agents on the 8th of March. The U.S. government wanted to deport him, arguing his activism was detrimental to its foreign policy interests. But in late June, after spending more than a hundred days in immigration detention, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Khalil was not a flight risk or threat to his community and could be released.

HAMED ALEAZIZ: It's just another point, like they're willing to send people to these facilities. There's more room. They, um, you know, it's closer to some of the deportation flight locations. There's just a whole mechanism, there's a whole process surrounding it. But I would say as far as who's being caught up in these immigration operations, you see right now that ICE is under pressure to deliver numbers. And so migrants are being arrested when they show up at their court hearings, um, at different interviews with immigration agencies. They're being picked up even if they're not the target of a operation, if they're just around someone who's a target of the operation. Basically, what this administration has done is that if you are undocumented, you are a priority.

AJ: And many of these, of course, are not convicted of any crime when they're being held there. The next facility I wanted to talk about is one that has been built very hastily, very recently, known as 'Alligator Alcatraz' in Florida, which you've done some reporting on. And, you know, when we're looking at other ICE detention centres in Florida, there was just recently this Human Rights Watch report that found wide-scale abuses in some of these facilities around Miami. Things like, you know, detainees being made to kneel and eat like dogs; people denied food; female detainees forced to use the toilets in full view of male detainees. And so what can you tell me about the conditions at this new facility, Alligator Alcatraz, and the kind of conditions that people are being held in there?

HAMED ALEAZIZ: Yeah, this is a really remarkable, um, you know, situation we have right now, where a state, the state of Florida has built an immigration detention centre. This is... you know, nothing like this exists in America right now, and this is kind of an experiment in many ways. And we've heard from detainees that there were infrequent showers; um, the meals didn't amount to much. That, you know, detainees were getting sick. And definitely there was a sense from detainees that people were on edge with just a lack of information. One detainee said that it was like a-- it's a, it's a tinderbox. And, but what the state says, what the administration says, is that this is basically helping the federal government to carry out their mass deportation goals and creating more capacity; the state helping DHS to enforce immigration laws and to deport people at a time when ICE is looking for as much detention capacity as possible. And, you know, it really does speak to the fact that Florida, unlike, you know, other states, has really kind of led and been at the forefront of collaborating and cooperating with ICE. Not only have they created this really unique immigration detention centre, but they have their officers in a program where they actually help ICE officers by picking up immigrants, by detaining immigrants. So they're not only helping them to hold them in a detention centre but also helping them pick up immigrants as well. It's almost a... a force multiplier for ICE. There's just been a real, you know, cry of outrage from advocates who say that this is inappropriate, that it's illegal, and that, you know, these migrants just simply do not have the access to attorneys like they do in other detention centres. I mean, for any ICE detainee in federal custody, you can look them up in a government database, you know, you can see where they're being held. But for this detention centre, you cannot. And that's, you know, caused some consternation amongst a lot of folks.

[music]

AJ: Let's talk about what this might end up looking like down the road then. I mean, this Third Country policy is, you know, concerning for many people, because of, as we've been talking about, you know, its challenge of the law and the precedent it sets, and this kind of radical shift that it seems to mark; and because people have a lot of fears about where this could lead, particularly because, for example, Donald Trump has talked quite a bit about the prospect of stripping American-born citizens of their, of their citizenship status and sending them to foreign countries as well.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: We can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis. And some of the cases we're talking about would be ending birthright citizenship, which now comes to the fore. That was meant for the babies of slaves. It wasn't meant for people trying to scam the system and come into the country on sa vacation.

AJ: You know, is there any fear about the prospect that this program could serve like as a kind of primer for one that could eventually be focused on American citizens as well?

HAMED ALEAZIZ: You know, I, I, I think... no. Just because the process of denaturalizing somebody, of stripping citizenship from somebody who has immigrated to this country and who has gained citizenship, that process is extensive, and the government has to go through a long process where they have to prove, um, you know, a whole set of things, including, you know, that somebody committed fraud in gaining their U.S. citizenship. Typically, you know, we've seen historically, this is for people who have hidden some sort of history of being in, um, a military in their own country, or, you know, being a war criminal or whatever it may be. So the bar is historically quite high. And, you know, there isn't just some mass-- there hasn't been a mass effort to denaturalize in the modern era. [AJ: Mm-hmm.] But we have seen that this administration has said that denaturalization is a priority.

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS PRESENTER 3: ...memo from the Trump administration says they want to denaturalize U.S. citizens for serious offences. Those would include war crimes but also suspicions of lying on immigration forms and defrauding the government for benefits. I'm also told this denaturalization process would happen under civil law. This means the government has a lower bar to prove offences, and defendants will have no right to an attorney.

HAMED ALEAZIZ: I think the key is seeing how they're actually going to implement that, how they're actually going to carry that out. Because they said the same thing, essentially, in the first administration in 2020, and, you know, it wasn't a massive change, um, any big shift. So I think right now, um, it's still wait and see. But that doesn't mean that for folks who are here who are undocumented, or, you know, have status that is-- you know, have a visa that's going to expire or... and they don't plan on leaving the country, like, all these groups of people. Um, if you are in the country without legal status, the administration's priority is to deport you, to arrest you, and sometimes that means being sent to a third country.

AJ: I mean, I've seen some people kind of just describe fears of this turning into like a kind of Guantanamo 2.0. You know, not for terrorism suspects, but for immigrants, for asylum seekers, you know, for dissidents. Is that a concern that you've heard about?

HAMED ALEAZIZ: Yeah, people have raised all kinds of concerns about the idea of taking people to a foreign country that's not their own. There has been a real fervent pushback to these deportations. But, you know, thus far, the courts have resisted this advocacy, this opposition, this feeling that these are, in many ways, government-led disappearances. I mean, that is the way some people have framed it. And thus far, the administration has been able to continue it.

AJ: Hamed, thank you so much for this interview.

HAMED ALEAZIZ: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[Music: Theme]

AJ: All right, that's all for today. I'm Allie Jaynes. Thanks so much for listening to Front Burner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

For more Front Burner transcripts, please click here.

From Texas to South Sudan: ICE's deportation pipeline - Transcript

Social Sharing