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A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the U.S. government violated his court order by attempting to deport migrants to South Sudan, opening another front in a battle between Donald Trump and judges who have imposed checks on the Republican president’s hardline immigration policies.

U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy said U.S. officials risked being held in contempt of court for violating a preliminary injunction he issued in April to block the administration from sending deportees to countries other than their own without the opportunity to raise any concerns they had for their safety.

At a hearing in Boston, the judge said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security failed to provide six migrants covered by his injunction a meaningful opportunity to contest being sent to South Sudan when it notified them of that possibility less than 24 hours before they were loaded onto a plane.

That was “plainly insufficient” notice, according to the judge. He later issued an order making clear that non-citizens must be given at least 10 days to raise a claim that they fear for their safety before they are deported to a country other than their own.

Before US President Donald Trump welcomed his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, into the Oval Office on Wednesday, White House aides had set up two large-screen televisions in the West Wing. The stage was set for what Western media called an “ambush”, as Trump soon asked the staff to dim the lights and play him a video that he claimed proved genocide was being committed against white people in South Africa, driving farmers to flee to the United States.

The four-minute video played on a large screen showed South Africa’s firebrand far-left opposition lawmaker Julius Malema singing “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer” — an infamous chant dating back to the apartheid-era fight against white-minority rule. It finished with images of a protest in South Africa where white crosses were placed along a rural roadside to represent murdered farmers — but which Trump falsely said showed their graves.

“You do allow them to take land, and then when they take the land, they kill the white farmer, and when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them,” Trump said, accusing Ramaphosa. 

The extraordinary stunt turned the usually staid diplomatic setting of the Oval Office into a stage for Trump’s contention that white South African farmers are being forced off their land and killed. 

Until the last half-decade, the majestic lesser flamingo had four African breeding sites: two salt pans in Botswana and Namibia, a soda lake in Tanzania, and an artificial dam outside South Africa’s historic diamond-mining town of Kimberley.

Now it only has three.

Years of raw sewage spilling into Kamfers Dam, the only South African water body where lesser flamingos congregated in large enough numbers to breed, have rendered the water so toxic that the distinctive pink birds have abandoned it, according to conservationists and a court judgment against the local council seen by Reuters.

Lesser flamingos are currently considered near-threatened, rather than endangered, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature: there are 2-3 million left, four-fifths of them spread across Africa, the rest in a smaller area of South Asia.

But they are in steep decline, and the poisoning of one of their last few breeding sites has worsened their plight dramatically.

Tania Anderson, a conservation biologist specialising in flamingos, told Reuters the IUCN was about to increase its threat-level to “vulnerable”, meaning “at high risk of extinction in the wild”, owing largely to their shrinking habitats of salty estuaries or soda lakes shallow enough for them to wade through.

“It’s really very upsetting,” Anderson said of the sewage spills in Kamfers Dam. “Flamingos play a pivotal role in maintaining the water ecosystems of our wetlands.”

A 2021 study in Biological Conservation found sewage threatens aquatic ecosystems across a vast area of the planet. Although 200 nations came together at the U.N. COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia last year to tackle threats to wildlife, no agreement was reached.

‘They just Disappeared’

Footage taken by the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa in May 2020 shows Kamfers Dam turned flamboyant pink with flamingos. When Reuters visited this month, there were none.

A closer look at the water revealed a green sludge that bubbled and stank of human waste.

“It was a sea of pink,” Brenda Booth recalled, as she gazed over the bird-free lake located on the farm she owns, dotted with acacia trees and antelope.

“They all just disappeared,” said Booth, who last month secured the court order compelling the African National Congress-run municipality in charge of Kimberley, a city of 300,000, to fix the problem.

Over the years, the treatment plant “became progressively dysfunctional to the point where … approximately 36 megalitres a day of untreated sewage was being discharged into the dam,” said Adrian Horwitz, the lawyer bringing the case in the High Court of South Africa, Northern Cape division.

Municipality manager Thapelo Matlala told Reuters thieves had vandalised the plant and stolen equipment, grinding it to a halt.

“We are working on a new strategy for … repairing the damage,” he said outside his office, adding that this needed 106 million rand ($5.92 million), money the council didn’t have.

Failure to deliver services was one of the main reasons the ANC lost its 30-year-strong majority in last year’s elections.

Lesser flamingos mostly eat spirulina, a blue-green algae – filtering it through their beaks. This limits them to alkaline water bodies, largely in East Africa’s Rift Valley.

They’re fussy about where they breed, with just three sites in India alongside the remaining three in Africa.

Flamingos began breeding at Kamfers Dam in 2006, said Ester van der Westhuizen-Coetzer, wetlands specialist for local diamond miner Ekapa Group, as she waded through grassland at the edge of another lake where she had spotted a flock.

In 2020, there were 71,000 on the dam, with up to 5,000 new chicks each season.

“They’ve missed three or four breeding seasons,” she said, and many also died of botulism, a disease that flourishes in waste.

Sewage has become a problem across South Africa, where few treatment plants are in working order, and if nothing is done, “the whole system will degrade and blow up,” she said.

“That will have a huge impact, and not only on flamingos.”

The “white genocide” myth serves no one. It stokes fear among white South Africans, trivialises the pain of Black South Africans, and hands a loaded weapon to racists in America and Europe.

What was once a flood of unverified videos consumed on social media now appears to be making its way into the White House, gaining the legitimacy and official weight it often lacks. Last Wednesday, President Donald Trump brought this trend to a theatrical peak during South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s visit. Intended as a diplomatic reset after a rocky period in bilateral relations, the meeting quickly took an unexpected turn. In a live meeting, Trump caught Ramaphosa off guard by claiming that white farmers in South Africa were being “persecuted” and “killed.” He even played a grainy video showing white crosses on a roadside – described solemnly and somewhat misleadingly, as the “graves” of murdered white farmers.

When questioned about the origins of the footage, Trump admitted he didn’t know exactly where in South Africa it had been filmed. Elon Musk, a South Africa-born tech mogul, added momentum to the narrative by tweeting a video of politician Julius Malema singing “Dubul’ ibhunu” (“Shoot the Boer”) – a liberation-era song that some interpret as incendiary. Both men, neither known for deep engagement with South African political history, helped amplify a narrative that many experts see as alarmist and misleading.

South Africa said Monday it plans to buy liquefied natural gas from the United States in a proposed deal worth around $1 billion a year, after a tense televised encounter between the countries’ presidents.

In return for agreeing to buy the gas (LNG), South Africa would avoid paying duty on exports of 40,000 vehicles a year to the United States, cabinet minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni wrote in a newspaper comment piece.

The proposals followed tense talks between South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and his US counterpart Donald Trump at the White House last week, which aimed to reset plummeting relations and save trade ties vital to South Africa’s sputtering economy.

Under the terms of a deal yet to be finalised, South Africa would import LNG from the United States for 10 years, Ntshavheni wrote in the country’s Sunday Times newspaper.

The United States would also invest in gas infrastructure development in South Africa, including in fracking, said Ntshavheni, who was in the delegation that accompanied Ramaphosa at the talks on Wednesday.

South Africa would in turn be able to export 40,000 vehicles a year to the United States without duties as well as 385,000 tonnes of steel and 132,000 tonnes of aluminium, she said.

She said the deal would yield about $900m-1.2bn in trade a year.

South Africa has a vast trade deficit with the United States, which has threatened to impose 30-percent tariffs.

The proposed deal would also allow duty-free imports of automotive components from South Africa for US car production.

“These are numbers contained in the trade deal proposal that South Africa has presented to the USTR (US Trade Representative) for consideration and further negotiations,” Ramaphosa’s spokesman Vincent Magwenya told AFP.

Ramaphosa said in his weekly newsletter Monday that a key outcome of the talks was “agreement on an economic cooperation channel between the US administration and South Africa to engage further on tariffs and a broad range of trade matters”.

“There is potential to increase and diversify trade between our two countries in areas such as gas, mining and critical minerals, agriculture and nuclear products,” he said.

It was also agreed that Washington would be represented at a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies in Johannesburg in November, Ramaphosa said.

Trump had threatened to skip the meeting hosted under the South African presidency this year, as ties frayed over a range of domestic and international policy issues.

During the talks in Washington, Trump confronted Ramaphosa on camera with unfounded claims of genocide against white farmers in South Africa.

But Ramaphosa insisted “the overarching aim of our visit was to deepen our strategic economic partnership with the US as our second-largest trading partner.”

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