The Trump administration's plans for mass deportation now include Libya, which would represent a remarkable development given the North African country's controversial treatment of migrants, and its fraught history with the U.S.

U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued an order on Wednesday restricting the removal of migrants to Libya after Reuters, citing three U.S. officials, reported the previous day that the Trump administration may for the first time deport migrants there.

Murphy noted a prior court order barring officials from swiftly deporting migrants to countries other than their own without first weighing whether they risk persecution or torture if sent there.

Reuters could not determine how many migrants would be sent to Libya or the nationalities of those the administration was eyeing for deportation. The news agency spoke to relatives of one Mexican national who had been instructed to sign a document allowing for his deportation to the African nation, they claimed. Immigration rights advocates said in court filings that individuals potentially subject to deportation to Libya also included Filipino, Laotian and Vietnamese migrants.

The Pentagon referred queries to the White House. The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

A State Department spokesperson said: "We do not discuss the details of our diplomatic communications with other governments."

Murphy wrote: "If there is any doubt — the Court sees none — the allegedly imminent removals, as reported by news agencies and as Plaintiffs seek to corroborate with class-member accounts and public information, would clearly violate this Court's Order."

Lawyers for a group of migrants have also asked Murphy to block migrants from any country en route to Libya, including Saudi Arabia, without ensuring their due process rights were met.

Trafficking, torture alleged

The administration had recently argued that Murphy's prior order only applied to DHS and not the Department of Defence, which U.S. officials told Reuters would be involved in flying migrants to Libya.

Murphy said on Wednesday that DHS could not "evade" his order by transferring responsibility to other agencies.

Libya's Government of National Unity said on Wednesday it rejected the use of its territory as a destination for deporting migrants without its knowledge or consent. It also said there was no co-ordination with the U.S. regarding the transfer of migrants.

Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army, which controls eastern Libya, also rejected the idea, saying in a statement that taking in migrants deported from the U.S. "violates the sovereignty of the homeland."

Libya has been a hotspot the past decade for global migration flows, with Africans from several countries often departing in rickety boats and other vessels for perilous crossings of the Mediterranean into Europe. Of the 2,400 known cases of people who either died or went missing trying to cross the central Mediterranean Sea between April 2023 and April 2024, the UN has documented over half departed from Libya.

In 2017, Italy enacted controversial deals with Libya — and years later, Albania — to receive expelled migrants.

Despite the imprimatur of that G7 country, years later, conditions in migrant detention centres are still being described in harsh terms.

Migrants from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and other African nations have been documented in dozens of detention facilities in Libya run by militias accused of torture and other abuses.

"Trafficking, torture, forced labour, extortion, starvation in intolerable conditions of detention" are "perpetrated at scale" within Libya, said Volker Turk, UN high commissioner for human rights, last year in the wake of a damning report.

'The further away from America, the better': Rubio

In 2019, at least 53 migrants were killed at a migrant detention centre in Tajoura, about 15 kilometres east of the capital, Tripoli, in an errant airstrike from Haftar's military. Just days after the tragedy, officials began re-admitting new migrants to the same facility.

On several occasions, mass graves containing the bodies of migrants have been located in Libya. The International Organization of Migration told Reuters that the bodies of at least 19 migrants found in a grave in February bore gunshot wounds.

The U.S. State Department has also noted Libya's "harsh and life-threatening prison conditions," in recent months, albeit before the transition from a Democratic administration to the Trump-led Republican White House.

The new administration has tried, among other methods, to encourage migrants to leave voluntarily by threatening steep fines, trying to strip away legal status and cancelling an app that migrants the past two years used for asylum claims.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week hinted that Washington was looking to expand the number of countries where it may deport people.

"The further away from America, the better," Rubio said at a cabinet meeting at the White House last Wednesday.

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Expanding list of receiving countries

In less than four months, the administration has sent migrants to Costa Rica, Panama and El Salvador, as well as its military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Democrats have slammed Kristi Noem, head of the Department of Homeland Security, and some Republican Congress members, who have released approving videos shot at El Salvador's notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT).