Eight men deported from the United States in May and held under guard for weeks at an American military base in the African nation of Djibouti while their legal challenge played out in court have now reached the Trump administration’s intended destination,

A federal judge briefly halted the Trump administration on Friday from placing eight migrants on a plane destined for conflict-ridden South Sudan, to give the men time to make their argument to a court in Massachusetts.

The Trump administration said it deported a group of eight men convicted of serious crimes in the United States to the conflict-ridden African country of South Sudan, following a legal saga that had kept the deportees stuck in a military base in Djibouti for weeks.