The White House achieved another late victory in its immigration enforcement efforts when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its favor on Monday. Six of the high court justices barred an injunction previously put in place by a Massachusetts court that kept the Trump administration from deporting immigrants to countries they have no ties to.
Six of the nine justices joined in on the brief opinion to stay, with the court’s liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissenting in greater length.
“Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this Court now intervenes to grant the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied. I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion,” Sotomayor wrote.
Following the Monday opinion, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, posted on social media, “Fire up the deportation planes.”
“If these activist judges had their way, aliens who are so uniquely barbaric that their own countries won’t take them back, including convicted murderers, child rapists and drug traffickers, would walk free on American streets,” she added. “DHS can now execute its lawful authority and remove illegal aliens to a country willing to accept them.”
The Massachusetts judge whose previous judgment is at the center of this legal battle filed an order late Monday, claiming that his ruling remains in “full force and effect” despite the Supreme Court opinion, according to CNN.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy previously ruled in May that the federal government must give potential deportees a chance to prove their safety would not be at risk if they were to be deported to another country. Murphy set a requirement of at least 10 days for immigrants to express their fear of removal and then “giving them at least 15 days to seek to reopen their immigration proceedings if the government determines that they do not meet all of these criteria,” per SCOTUSblog.
The case centered around a class action lawsuit involving migrants who were challenging their deportation removal status to developing countries, specifically to South Sudan, where the U.S. State Department has a “do not travel” label on the country due to “crime, kidnapping and armed conflict.” Last month, the Trump administration attempted to deport seven men there who were not from Sudan, resulting in Murphy threatening to hold officials in criminal contempt for the move. Since then, the men have been held at a U.S. military base in Djibouti.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer appealed Murphy’s ruling to the Supreme Court, resulting in its Monday decision.
In her shared dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the Trump administration’s attempt to deport the individuals despite Murphy’s ruling and now with a win at the Supreme Court “grant(ed) the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied.”
Respecting the judiciary is “a bedrock of the rule of law,” she added, and the “Government’s misconduct threatens it to its core. ... Each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.”