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A lawyer for Ahmed Soliman, a 31-year-old Phoenix man who has been arbitrarily detained in Equatorial Guinea since April, when US immigration agents forced him onto a plane under the Trump administration’s third-country deportation policy, expressed cautious optimism and relief on Wednesday after a federal judge ruled that the Department of Homeland Security must return Soliman to the United States.

“We all frankly broke into tears of relief, and hope” when the ruling in the US District Court of Arizona was handed down, Dana Camilleri, a senior attorney at Green Evans-Schroeder, told the Arizona Daily Star.

District Judge John C. Hinderaker, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, ordered DHS to “take all reasonable steps within their control” to facilitate Soliman’s return to the US.

Soliman’s removal to Equatorial Guinea violated his due process rights under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, said Hinderaker, who said the man has faced “irreparable harm” after being “unlawfully” deported.

As Common Dreams reported last month, human rights advocates have warned that Soliman has been placed at risk of being tortured in Equatorial Guinea, where he and dozens of other people deported by the Trump administration have been held at a decommissioned hotel in Malabo.

Report: Trump Admin Is Deporting LGBTQ Asylum Seekers to Hostile Third Countries

None of the prisoners have any ties to Equatorial Guinea, which Trump paid $7.5 million in one of several secretive deals, in exchange for taking deportees whom the US is barred from sending to their home countries due to their........

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