Supreme Court Allows Rapid Deportations to ‘Third Countries’

“Fire up the deportation planes,” the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media. That’s the message it got from the Supreme Court, which permitted the Trump Administration to resume the rapid removal of undocumented immigrants to countries other than their own.

The conservative-majority high court on Monday granted the Administration’s emergency request to put on hold an April injunction issued by a federal district court judge that required deportees be given written notice and “meaningful opportunity” to challenge their removal to so-called third countries.

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Since Donald Trump began his second term, his Administration has been working out agreements with countries including El Salvador, Guatemala, Kosovo, Rwanda, and more to accept expelled migrants from the U.S. no matter their country of origin.

Read More: What the Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Experienced

The Trump Administration argued that third-country deportations are necessary in order to remove “the worst of the worst,” because for migrants who have committed “heinous” crimes, “their countries of origin are often unwilling to take them back.” The request cited a recent case in which the same federal judge who issued the injunction in April blocked in May the deportation of a group of migrants, described by DHS as “some of the most barbaric, violent individuals illegally in the United States,” who were scheduled to be sent to conflict-ridden South Sudan.

Lawyers for the migrants have repeatedly argued that their removal to South Sudan would subject them to “a strong likelihood of irreparable harm.” Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance reiterated after the Supreme Court’s decision that the deportees face possible “imprisonment, torture and even death” if sent to South Sudan, according to the Associated Press.

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In the Administration’s request for a stay, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said that because the deportees were sent instead to Camp Lemonnier, a U.S. military base in Djibouti, the injunction was “disrupting the base’s operations, consuming critical resources intended for service members, and harming national security.”

The Supreme Court offered no explanation for its decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, along with fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. Sotomayor, in a lengthy opinion, said she cannot join “so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion,” arguing that the court is “rewarding lawlessness.”

“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.

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“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,” Sotomayor added.

The Justice Department said in court documents for the case of the deportees in Djibouti that it is assessing its next steps following the Supreme Court’s decision.

Lawyers for those deportees filed a motion for individual injunctive relief, arguing that lower-court judges still have the power to block deportations on a case-by-case basis. The motion was denied “as unnecessary” by the federal judge who argued that his May order blocking their deportation was unaffected by the Supreme Court decision on his earlier injunction. The Supreme Court decision is expected to open the floodgates for many individual claims to be brought before lower courts over third-country deportation orders.