The Supreme Court stayed a lower court’s order requiring the Trump administration to provide due process to deportees who they planned to remove to “third-party countries.”
In an unsigned order shared on Monday, the court paused the lower court’s requirements in deportation cases where migrants are being removed to countries other than their own. Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the ruling “inexcusable” and said that the court was “rewarding lawlessness” from Trump’s Department of Justice in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“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.”
In a statement to NBC News, Trina Realmuto of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance called the order “horrifying.”
“It strips away critical due process protections that have been protecting our class members from torture and death,” said Realmuto, whose group helped bring the initial case.
US District Judge Brian Murphy had found that the Trump administration’s decision to deport migrants to countries like El Salvador and South Sudan without allowing them to argue against their removal “unquestionably” violated the Constitution. The Trump administration requested emergency relief from the order, saying it needed the authority to carry out deportations quickly.
“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 Sauer told the high court in his appeal.
Sotomayor’s dissent tore into her colleagues on the court for granting “emergency relief from an order [the government has repeatedly defied.”
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