WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to restart swift removals of migrants to countries other than their homelands, lifting for now a court order requiring they get a chance to challenge the deportations.
The high court majority did not detail its reasoning in the brief order, as is typical on its emergency docket. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the other two liberal justices, issued a scathing dissent.
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin suggested third-country deportations could restart soon. “Fire up the deportation planes,” she said in a statement, calling the decision “a victory for the safety and security of the American people.”
The court action came after immigration officials put eight people on a plane to South Sudan, though they later diverted to an American naval base in Djibouti after a judge stepped in.
The migrants from countries including Myanmar, Vietnam and Cuba had been convicted of serious crimes in the U.S., and immigration officials have said they were unable to return them quickly to their home countries.
Their attorneys continued to press for a court order blocking their removal to South Sudan until they have a chance to talk with lawyers and raise concerns of “imprisonment, torture and even death there,” attorney Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, wrote.
The case comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown by Republican President Donald Trump’s administration, which has pledged to deport millions of people who are living in the United States illegally.
“The Constitution and Congress have vested authority in the President to enforce immigration laws and remove dangerous aliens from the homeland,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. The Supreme Court’s action “reaffirms the President’s authority to remove criminal illegal aliens from our country and Make America Safe Again.”
In her 19-page dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the court’s action exposes “thousands to the risk of torture or death” and gives the Trump administration a win despite earlier violating the lower court’s order.
“The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard,” she wrote in the dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
South Sudan, the world’s newest and one of its poorest countries, has endured repeated waves of violence since gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, and escalating political tensions in the African nation have threatened to devolve into another civil war.
The Justice Department said in court documents that the government is weighing the order to decide its next steps.
The Supreme Court action halts an order from U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy in Boston, who decided in April that people must get a chance to argue deportation to a third country would put them in danger — even if they have otherwise exhausted their legal appeals.
He found that the May deportations to South Sudan violated his order and told immigration authorities to allow people to raise those concerns through their lawyers. Immigration officials housed the migrants in a converted shipping container in Djibouti, where they and the officers guarding them faced rough conditions.
The administration has reached agreements with other countries, including Panama and Costa Rica, to house immigrants because some countries do not accept their citizens deported from the U.S. The migrants sent to South Sudan in May got less than 16 hours’ notice, Sotomayor wrote.
Murphy, who was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden, didn’t prohibit deportations to third countries. But he found migrants must have a real chance to argue they could be in serious danger of torture if sent to another country.
Another order in the same case resulted in the Trump administration returning a gay Guatemalan man who had been wrongly deported to Mexico, where he says he had been raped and extorted — the first person known to have been returned to U.S. custody after deportation since the start of Trump’s second term.
The justices confronted a similar issue in Trump’s effort to send Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador with little chance to challenge the deportations in court.
But in that case, the justices put the brakes on deportations under an 18th century wartime law, saying migrants must get a “reasonable time” to file a court challenge before being removed.
The conservative-majority court has sided with Trump in other immigration cases, however, clearing the way for his administration to end temporary legal protections affecting a total of nearly a million immigrants.
Those victories are among several recent wins the Trump administration has recently racked up before the conservative-majority court as it pushes to move ahead with the president’s sweeping agenda on issues ranging from a ban on transgender troops in the military to the dramatic downsizing of the federal government.
