The US Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for President Donald Trump’s administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their own without offering them a chance to show the harms they could face, handing him another victory in his aggressive pursuit of mass deportations.
The justices lifted a judicial order that required the US government to give migrants set for deportation to so-called “third countries” a “meaningful opportunity” to tell officials they are at risk of torture at their new destination, while a legal challenge plays out. Boston-based US District Judge Brian Murphy had issued the order on April 18.
The Supreme Court’s brief order was unsigned and came with no reasoning, as is common when it decides emergency requests. The court has a 6–3 conservative majority.
In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, criticized the decision, calling it a “gross abuse” of the court’s discretion.
“Apparently, the court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung 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.”
After the Department of Homeland Security moved in February to step up rapid deportations to third countries, immigrant rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of a group of migrants seeking to prevent their removal to such places without notice and a chance to assert the harms they could face.
Murphy, on May 21, found that Trump’s administration had violated his order mandating further procedures in trying to send a group of migrants to politically unstable South Sudan—a country that the US State Department has warned against any travel to “due to crime, kidnapping and armed conflict.”
The judge’s intervention prompted the US government to keep the migrants at a military base in Djibouti, although American officials later said one of the deportees, a man from Myanmar, would instead be deported to his home country. Of the other passengers who were on the flight, one is South Sudanese, while the others are from Cuba, Mexico, Laos, and Vietnam.
“The ramifications of (the) Supreme Court’s order will be horrifying,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, which is helping to represent the plaintiffs.
The decision “strips away critical due process protections that have been protecting our class members from torture and death,” Realmuto said.
Murphy had found that the administration’s policy of “executing third-country removals without providing notice and a meaningful opportunity to present fear-based claims” likely violates due process requirements under the Constitution. Due process generally requires the government to provide notice and an opportunity for a hearing before taking certain adverse actions. (Reuters)
