Gambiaj.com – (WASHINGTON, DC) – The United States Supreme Court on Monday granted the Trump administration the authority to resume rapid deportations of migrants to countries other than their homelands, overturning a lower court order that had mandated a chance for these individuals to challenge their removals.
The high court’s majority did not provide detailed reasoning for its decision, a common practice in its emergency docket rulings. However, Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a scathing dissent, joined by the two other liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin indicated that third-country deportations could restart swiftly. “Fire up the deportation planes,” she declared in a statement, hailing the decision as “a victory for the safety and security of the American people.”
This Supreme Court action follows an incident where immigration officials had placed eight individuals on a plane bound for South Sudan.
The flight was later diverted to an American naval base in Djibouti after a judge intervened. These migrants, from countries including Myanmar, Vietnam, and Cuba, had been convicted of serious crimes in the U.S. Immigration officials stated they were unable to return them quickly to their home countries.
Attorneys for the migrants, including Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, had been pressing for a court order to block their removal to South Sudan, citing concerns of “imprisonment, torture, and even death there.”
The ruling comes amid a broad immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, which has pledged to deport millions of people living in the United States illegally. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson stated, “The Constitution and Congress have vested authority in the President to enforce immigration laws and remove dangerous aliens from the homeland.” She added that 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, Justice Sotomayor sharply criticized the majority’s decision, writing that it exposes “thousands to the risk of torture or death” and grants a win to the Trump administration despite its earlier violation of a lower court’s order. She asserted, “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.”
South Sudan, the world’s newest and one of its poorest countries, has experienced recurrent violence since its independence from Sudan in 2011, with escalating political tensions threatening to ignite another civil war.
The Justice Department stated in court documents that the government is currently evaluating the order to determine its next steps.
The Supreme Court’s action effectively halts an order from U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy in Boston. Judge Murphy, appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden, had ruled in April that individuals must be given an opportunity to argue that deportation to a third country would endanger them, even if they had exhausted other legal appeals.
Judge Murphy had found that May deportations to South Sudan violated his order, instructing immigration authorities to allow individuals to raise these concerns through their lawyers. During that time, immigration officials housed the migrants in a converted shipping container in Djibouti, where both they and their guards faced harsh conditions.
The Trump administration has made agreements with other countries, including Panama and Costa Rica, to house immigrants, as some nations do not accept the return of their citizens deported from the U.S. According to Sotomayor’s dissent, the migrants sent to South Sudan in May received less than 16 hours’ notice.
While Judge Murphy did not prohibit deportations to third countries, he emphasized the necessity for migrants to have a genuine chance to argue they could face serious danger of torture if sent to another country.
In a related development within the same case, the Trump administration was ordered to return a gay Guatemalan man who had been wrongly deported to Mexico, where he alleged he was raped and extorted. This marked the first known instance of an individual being returned to U.S. custody after deportation since the beginning of Trump’s second term.
The justices previously faced a similar issue concerning Trump’s effort to send Venezuelans accused of gang membership to a notorious prison in El Salvador with limited opportunity to challenge their deportations in court. In that instance, however, the justices paused deportations under an 18th-century wartime law, mandating that migrants receive a “reasonable time” to file a court challenge before removal.
Despite this, the conservative-majority court has largely sided with Trump in other immigration cases, including clearing the way for his administration to terminate temporary legal protections for nearly a million immigrants.
These victories are among several recent successes the Trump administration has achieved before the conservative-majority court as it advances the president’s sweeping agenda on various issues, from a ban on transgender troops in the military to a significant downsizing of the federal government.
