The Trump administration can immediately resume its summary deportations of anyone it labels an “enemy alien” to an El Salvador prison widely accused of torturing inmates — as long as it affords them some indeterminate extra time to challenge their detention, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday.
The ruling from the divided high court marked a victory for President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration operations, revoking lower court orders that sought to halt the administration’s new law enforcement tactics on humanitarian and constitutional grounds.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority was convinced by the Trump administration’s most technical argument: that a class action lawsuit seeking to stop these rapid removals was filed in the wrong district — the nation’s capital.
Instead, justices wrote, detainees themselves must challenge these deportations-in-progress in the regions where they are taking place.
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However, that legal conclusion does not address a core issue that came up as human rights lawyers fought on behalf of detained Venezuelans and Salvadorans: that many detainees have no idea where they are as they’ve been quickly ping-ponged among privately-run, for-profit jails across the country — then loaded onto government-contracted planes bound for unknown locations.
Law enforcement records made public in court filings during this three-week legal battle show that the Trump administration has created a legal notice — a typo-riddled sheet of paper that claims, “You are not entitled to a hearing, appeal, or judicial review of this notice and warrant of apprehension and removal.”
The Supreme Court steered clear of making any final determinations on Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to engage in this aggressive new administration policy. Instead, it opted to fractionalize this class action effort and disperse any legal challenges, which are now likely to pop up in various districts that have become hubs for immigration detention in Louisiana and Texas.
“Detainees subject to removal orders under the AEA are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal. The only question is which court will resolve that challenge,” the court’s majority wrote, specifying that “venue lies in the district of confinement.”
Meanwhile, a forceful dissent came from the high court’s three liberal justices: Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, partially joined by Amy Coney Barrett. They took issue with the way Trump reached for a wartime measure during a time of peace, stressing that this new law enforcement tactic is occurring without due process.
Sotomayor castigated the conservative majority’s legal reasoning as “suspect” and “dubious,” writing that “the court should not reward the government’s efforts to erode the rule of law.”
Jackson separately wrote that Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to ship migrants to a foreign prison “should be quite concerning,” and she criticized her conservative colleagues for rushing this case with a “fly-by-night approach” she deemed “misguided” and “dangerous.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
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