The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to more quickly deport illegal migrants to countries not specified in their removal orders.
A majority temporarily blocked a lower court order that required the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to give migrants notice and allow them to raise concerns about potential threats of torture before deporting them to a “third country.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan dissented from the decision.
“Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in farflung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled,” Sotomayor wrote. “That use of discretion is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.”
The Trump administration argued the order interfered with their ability to deport “some of the worst of the worst illegal aliens” in its emergency application. (RELATED: Judge Really, Really Wants To Release Dems’ Favorite Suspected Human Smuggler)
“The United States is facing a crisis of illegal immigration, in no small part because many aliens most deserving of removal are often the hardest to remove,” Solicitor General John Saur wrote in May. “When illegal aliens commit crimes in this country, they are typically ordered removed. But when those crimes are especially heinous, their countries of origin are often unwilling to take them back. As a result, criminal aliens are often allowed to stay in the United States for years on end, victimizing law-abiding Americans in the meantime.”
District Court Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, wrote in his original order that plaintiffs “are simply asking to be told they are going to be deported to a new country before they are taken to such a country, and be given an opportunity to explain why such a deportation will likely result in their persecution, torture, and/or death.”
“This small modicum of process is mandated by the Constitution of the United States,” the judge wrote.
Attorneys for the migrants claimed in a brief that the administration “repeatedly sought to remove people as a punitive measure, to some of the most dangerous places on the planet, and with only hours’ notice.”
