Asked at a press conference in the Whitehouse yesterday if the U.S. is sending migrants to Libya, President Trump replied ‘‘I don’t know. You will have to ask Homeland Security’’.
Trump’s response comes after a 24-hour period when Libyan news was dominated by the news that the U.S. was sending its unwanted migrants to Libya.
CNN had reported that the Trump administration is moving forward with plans to transfer a group of undocumented immigrants to the Libyan city of Misrata, on a US military plane. CNN had claimed that a Trump ‘‘administration official’’ had confirmed the plan, but did not specify when the flight would be or whether other flights would follow.
This sent Libyan media into a frenzy, and indeed Flight Tracking data indicated that a U.S. C-17 military cargo plane planned a flight from Kelly Field Base in San Antonio to Misrata airport on Wednesday. It will be recalled that the United States has used these aircraft to transport immigrants in recent months.
FlightRadar tracks U.S. military cargo plane to Misrata
According to flight monitoring website FlightRadar, a U.S. Lockheed Martin C-130J military cargo plane, registration number 06-4631, did indeed land at Misrata International Airport from the U.S. Air Force base Sigonella in southern Italy. The plane stayed only 40 minutes at the airport, then left.
C-130J was transporting a military delegation
The Tripoli government said it was aware of the flight which it claimed was carrying a military delegation.
It reported that the Air Defence College in Misrata received a high-level Italian military delegation, which included the Chairman of the Libyan-Italian Relations Committee and the Director of the Training Department, on an official visit aimed at enhancing academic and technical cooperation in the defence field between Libya and Italy.
The delegation arrived on an Italian Government-owned C-130, which took off from the naval air base of Sigonella in Sicily as part of a scheduled patrol flight under existing military cooperation arrangements. The Tripoli government confirmed that the visit was of a purely training and technical nature, and has nothing to do with any other files.
U.S. media reports that U.S. administration talks continue about the possibility of deporting migrants to other African countries, such as Rwanda.
Meanwhile, both Libya’s Tripoli and Benghazi based governments, and Hafter’s army chief, have been quick to deny any agreement with the Trump administration to receive deported migrants.
A U.S. court injunction against sending migrants to Libya
Finally, since the news broke of the possibility of migrants being sent to Libya, a U.S. judge has ruled that any effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to deport migrants to Libya would clearly violate an earlier injunction barring officials from deporting migrants to countries other than their own, without assessing whether they would face the risk of persecution or torture if sent there.
