One of two documented immigrants with prior convictions detained by U.S. Immigrations and Customs (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents, walks towards a vehicle, at a Home Depot parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, U.S., January 26, 2025.
Rebecca Noble | Reuters
The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to resume quick deportations of certain immigrants to countries other than their own without advance warning, and the chance to challenge them on the grounds that they might end up being tortured or killed.
The court lifted an injunction issued in April by a federal District Court judge in Massachusetts that blocked the practice, which was put into place after an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in January.
Monday’s order by the Supreme Court will remain in effect as an appeal in the case by the Trump administration plays out.
The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices dissented from the order.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her scathing written dissent, said, “I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.”
“Fire up the deportation planes,” tweeted Assistant Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin.
“The SCOTUS ruling is a victory for the safety and security of the American people,” McLaughlin wrote. The Biden Administration allowed millions of illegal aliens to flood our country, and, now, the Trump Administration can exercise its undisputed authority to remove these criminal illegal aliens and clean up this national security nightmare.”
The head of the legal group representing the immigrations in a lawsuit led to the order, said in a statement: “The ramifications of Supreme Court’s order will be horrifying; it strips away critical due process protections that have been protecting our class members from torture and death.”
“Importantly, however, the Court’s ruling only takes issue with the court’s authority to afford these protections at this intermediate stage of the case,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance. “We now need to move as swiftly as possible to conclude the case and restore these protections.”
Sotomayor, in her dissent, wrote, “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution,” one of those justices.
“In this case, the Government took the opposite approach,” Sotomayor wrote.
“It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an Immigration Judge found he was likely to face torture there,” she wrote. “Then, in clear violation of a court order, it deported six more to South Sudan, a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel.”
“An attentive District Court’s timely intervention only narrowly prevented a third set of unlawful removals to Libya,” Sotomayor wrote.
“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 wrote.
