Johnson mum on judicial resources after SCOTUS deportations ruling

WASHINGTON (CN) — House Speaker Mike Johnson was reticent to say Tuesday whether he thought Congress should allocate more funds to the federal judiciary to handle new cases from migrants arguing they have been wrongfully targeted for deportation, after the Supreme Court affirmed they are entitled to due process rights.

But while legal experts said that more money for strained federal courts would be a good thing, they pointed out that there are mechanisms already in place which could help ease a potential backlog of new immigration cases.

In a 5-4 ruling Monday, the justices allowed the Donald Trump administration to continue deporting migrants to a dangerous prison in El Salvador using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — a wartime law which allows the government to remove citizens or denizens of a hostile foreign power. The White House has contended the migrants it wishes to deport are members of transnational gang Tren de Aragua, which it has positioned as an invading force.

But while the high court overruled a lower court’s hold on the deportations, all nine justices agreed that migrants are entitled to judicial review, finding anyone detained under the Alien Enemies act must receive notice and a reasonable amount of time to file a habeas petition contesting their proposed removal.

Any habeas petition, though, must be filed in the judicial district where the migrants are detained, the court said. In the case of the 200 or so Venezuelans the Trump administration is looking to deport, that would be in Texas.

Federal courts, especially in districts close to the U.S. border with Mexico, currently face crushing caseloads of migrants seeking asylum protections. As of February, there were nearly 2 million pending asylum cases across the judiciary.

And Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent Monday that requiring habeas petitions from each migrant could introduce its own delays which could put people at “grave” risk. She argued that failing to appeal deportation in a timely manner would put migrants in danger of being removed to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison with a particularly brutal reputation.

Asked during a news conference Tuesday whether he thought Congress should appropriate more funding to the federal judiciary to handle a possible influx of habeas cases from migrants, Johnson said everybody in the border security apparatus should have “the resources they need.”

“It does require additional resources, because we have so many people to process because the last administration opened the border wide,” the top House Republican said.

But as far as where such resourced could be applied, Johnson said lawmakers “don’t know what the specifics are yet.”

Legal experts, for their part, noted that while an affirmation of due process rights by the Supreme Court could lead to hundreds of new habeas cases, the effects on existing backlogs are far from guaranteed.

“The short answer is, I don’t think we know yet,” said James Hollifield, a professor of political science and director of Southern Methodist University’s Tower Center for Public Policy and International Affairs.

Hollifield explained while the justices had created a “space” for migrants to file habeas petitions, it will be hard to predict how long such cases would take to resolve until they start hitting court dockets.

He compared the possibility of new habeas cases to current asylum backlogs. “Those can be very long and drawn-out hearings,” Hollifield said. “Clearly, this would create a delay in summarily deporting people without due process.”

Carl Tobias, chair of the University of Richmond School of Law, agreed, and pointed out that delays in adjudicating migrants’ habeas petitions would come on a case-by-case basis.

“It can be anything from rudimentary up to … very fleshed out,” he said, adding that people who are in more dire situations — such as migrants who have already been deported to El Salvador — would likely want to contest their removal using the “full-blown process.”

But Hollifield observed that the number of potential habeas cases would be far fewer than existing asylum cases, and that there wouldn’t be the same kind of backlog for migrants looking to challenge their deportation orders.

“My sense right now is that a lot of these deportations, especially the ones where they’re using the Alien Enemies Act, are very targeted — almost to the point of being symbolic,” he said. “They’re meant to make a point.”

And experts said there are existing mechanisms for blunting the potential case burden on federal courts.

Tobias pointed to a proposed judgeships bill working its way through Congress, which would add dozens of new seats on federal benches across the country, including several in Texas. And, in the meantime, courts can task judges in other jurisdictions to pick up some of the slack.

“That’s always a viable option — moving judges who have a lighter docket around the country to places that have emergencies,” he said.

Hollifield said the issue of lacking judicial resources is not a new one, citing the longstanding backlog of asylum cases. He cautioned against the belief that Congress would step in now to address such an issue for migrants’ cases challenging deportation.

“I wouldn’t be optimistic that you would see any funds allocated to expand the justice system, if you will, for immigrants and asylum seekers,” he said. “I would be a bit skeptical of that, just because they’ve not really done much to address the huge asylum backlog.”

The Trump administration has already acknowledged that some of the migrants already deported to El Salvador were removed in error. The Justice Department has said that at least one person, a Salvadoran migrant married to a U.S. citizen who sought asylum protections in 2019, was sent to the country’s notorious megaprison thanks to an “administrative error.”

The Supreme Court’s Monday ruling overrode a halt on deportations implemented last month by D.C. District Judge James Boasberg, whose temporary order caused an uproar among Republicans and conservative figures.

Many — including Trump himself — called on Boasberg to be impeached.

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