HOUSTON, United States

Two Asian immigrants that were being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in the US state of Texas have been deported to South Sudan in violation of a federal court order, their attorneys said Tuesday.

The two men are originally from Myanmar and Vietnam and were awaiting immigration hearings until their lawyers were told of their deportation to the war-torn East African nation after receiving an abrupt notice Monday evening.

By Tuesday morning, their attorneys said the two men were already on a plane to South Sudan with as many as 10 other deportees.

"Today, I checked the online ICE detainee locator and saw that (my client) was no longer in the ICE detainee locator," said one of the detainees’ attorneys, Jacqueline Brown, in her court filing.

"I then emailed the Port Isabel Detention Center Law Visit email address to confirm whether N.M. was located at the facility...a Port Isabel Detention Center Detention Officer responded that (he) had been removed 'this morning.' I emailed to ask to which country (he) was removed, and the officer responded...'South Sudan.'"

The deportation of the two Asian men violates an emergency motion handed down by a federal judge in Boston, Massachusetts which barred the Trump administration from sending foreign nationals to so-called "third-party countries" rather than their country of origin without providing "meaningful" notice and a chance to raise concern about the possibility of torture in those countries.

In that case, deportees were being sent to the "third-party" country of Libya, which like South Sudan, is mired in a humanitarian crisis when it comes to human rights abuses.

The Department of Homeland Security has not yet commented on the lawyers' declarations of their clients' illegal removal from the US without due process.