The Supreme Court has given the Trump administration the go-ahead to send a group of immigrants who are being held at a U.S. military base in Djibouti back to South Sudan.
In a brief opinion issued on Friday, the justices affirmed that their prior order, which stayed a federal judge’s ruling in Massachusetts that had restricted the government’s ability to deport immigrants to countries not explicitly named in their removal orders, applies in full to the eight immigrants currently in U.S. custody in Djibouti.
The order came less than two weeks after the high court put a hold on a ruling by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy. His order said that the federal government could not deport immigrants to “third countries” (those not named in their removal orders) without first making sure, through a series of safeguards, that the people would not be tortured when they were sent back.
Murphy’s verdict on May 21 said that the government broke his April 18 order by trying to send eight individuals to South Sudan. The U.S. has sent home all non-emergency workers from South Sudan, and the State Department says not to go there because of “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”
The plane that was supposed to take the immigrants to South Sudan instead landed in Djibouti, which is close by. The men have been imprisoned inside a U.S. military post since then.
On May 27, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court to stay Murphy’s April 18 order, seeking permission to proceed with “third country” removals while the legal battle over the practice unfolds.
D. John Sauer, the U.S. Solicitor General, said that Murphy’s “judicially created procedures are currently wreaking havoc on the third-country removal process” and “disrupt[ing] sensitive diplomatic, foreign policy, and national-security efforts.”
Lawyers for the immigrants who could be sent back to a third country asked the justices to maintain Murphy’s decision. They stressed that the government might still go through with these deportations, but Murphy’s order “simply requires” the Trump administration “to follow the law” when doing so.
Murphy said that his May 21 ruling was still in effect after the Supreme Court responded to the Trump administration’s first request on June 23.
The next day, the Trump administration went back to the Supreme Court and asked the justices to make it clear what power the federal government has to deport the individuals who are now being held in Djibouti. Sauer told the court to move quickly to deal with what he called Murphy’s “unprecedented defiance” of the court’s authority.
The majority of the court’s ruling on Thursday, which was not signed, said that the “June 23 order stayed the April 18 preliminary injunction in full.” The May 21 ruling can’t be utilized to execute an injunction that our stay made impossible to enforce.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, both of whom are liberals, disagreed with the court’s conservative majority. Justice Elena Kagan, on the other hand, agreed with the court’s conservative majority.
She said that she had disagreed with the Supreme Court’s first decision to allow removals to third countries to go ahead. “But most of this court saw things differently, and I don’t see how a district court can force compliance with an order that this court has stayed,” she wrote.
Reports say that the eight undocumented immigrants are from Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos.
Sotomayor disagreed, saying, “What the Government wants to do, concretely, is send the eight noncitizens it illegally removed from the United States from Djibouti to South Sudan, where they will be turned over to the local authorities without regard for the likelihood that they will face torture or death.”
She said that the court shouldn’t have even thought about the government’s motion since the government should have established its case in the lower courts first. She also said that the Supreme Court’s “continued refusal to justify its extraordinary decisions in this case, even as it faults lower courts for failing to properly divine their import, is indefensible.”
