Homeland Security said it’s holding eight illegal immigrants in a shipping container at an American military base in the African country of Djibouti after a federal judge last month halted their deportation and ordered the government to give them more “due process.”   A US judge has no authority outside the US.

     The detainees and ICE officers assigned to guard them are getting sick with respiratory infections, and they risk rocket attacks from rebels in Yemen as they try to carry out the judge’s orders, the administration said in new court filings.  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has struggled to get enough officers into Djibouti to guard the migrants, all of whom have serious criminal records involving murder and sex.  “The aliens are currently being held in a conference room in a converted Conex shipping container on the U.S. naval base in Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti. This has been identified as the only viable place to house the aliens,” Mellissa Harper, a senior ICE official, told the court.

     U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, after ruling that the government violated the migrants’ rights with their speedy deportations to a country they had no ties to, gave the feds a choice of bringing them back to the U.S. for full due process or finding a way to deliver it overseas.  Faced with the optics of bringing back people it declared major security risks, the Trump administration opted to try to create detention and hearing space at the military base.  But it’s proved tricky, Ms. Harper admitted in the court filing. 

     She said temperatures regularly soar past 100 degrees during the day, and the base’s trash and human waste are disposed of in burn pits that operate at night just miles from the base, creating a nasty smog cloud that has left officers and detainees with what appears to be bacterial infections.