The Supreme Court on Monday granted President Donald Trump’s emergency request to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their homeland, including places like South Sudan, with minimal notice.
The decision is a significant win for the Trump administration, which had argued that a lower court usurped its authority by ordering the Department of Homeland Security to provide written notice to the migrants about where they would be sent as well as an opportunity to challenge that deportation on the grounds that they feared being tortured.
The court’s three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented.
The order pauses a decision from US District Judge Brian Murphy, which found that the government’s efforts to deport migrants to third-party countries without due process “unquestionably” violated constitutional protections.
Sotomayor said the court was “rewarding lawlessness” with its decision, asserting that the Trump administration has “openly flouted” previous court orders.
“Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this court now intervenes to grant the government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied,” she said.
The court itself offered no explanation for the decision.
“It’s difficult to overstate how big a deal today’s ruling is, especially in conjunction with the Supreme Court’s two emergency docket rulings last month that, respectively, allowed the Trump administration to cancel temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and parole for hundreds of thousands of other migrants,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
