Supreme Court empowers Trump to continue deportations to El Salvador prison

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court freed President Donald Trump from a restraining order grounding deportation flights on Monday, allowing the administration to continue deporting migrants under the Alien Enemies Act.

In an apparent 5-4 order, the court sided with the government because the migrants filed their appeal in D.C. instead of Texas.

“For ‘core habeas petitions,’ ‘jurisdiction lies in only one district: the district of confinement,’” the majority wrote in a per curiam opinion. “The detainees are confined in Texas, so venue is improper in the District of Columbia.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett dissented, rebuking their male colleagues for rewarding “the government’s efforts to erode the rule of law.”

The dissenting justices said requiring each migrant to file a habeas action exposed immigrants across the nation to severe and irreparable harm. Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, said the majority’s requirement could have life-or-death consequences.

“Individuals who are unable to secure counsel, or who cannot timely appeal an adverse judgment rendered by a habeas court, face the prospect of removal directly into the perilous conditions of El Salvador’s CECOT, where detainees suffer egregious human rights abuses,” Sotomayor wrote in an opinion joined by her colleagues. “Anyone the government mistakenly deports in its piecemeal and rushed implementation of the challenged proclamation will face the same grave risks.”

The Justice Department asked for emergency intervention to restart controversial migrant transfers to a notoriously dangerous prison in El Salvador, calling the deportations essential to protect national security and maintain foreign relationships.

Last month, the administration sent 137 migrants to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo over their supposed ties to the Tren de Aragua gang. According to the administration, Tren de Aragua is a de facto arm of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s regime; they say Maduro coordinates and relies on the gang to harm U.S. citizens and destabilize democratic nations.

Sotomayor stressed the danger the migrants could face in the infamous megaprison, stating that detainees are denied communication with their families and lawyers.

“El Salvador has boasted that inmates in CECOT ‘will never leave,’ and plaintiffs present evidence that ‘inmates are rarely allowed to leave their cells, have no regular access to drinking water or adequate food, sleep standing up because of overcrowding, and are held in cells where they do not see sunlight for days,’" Sotomayor wrote. “One scholar attests that an estimated 375 detainees have died in Salvadoran prisons since March 2022.”

The majority dismissed their dissenting colleagues’ “rhetoric,” suggesting that the justices only narrowly decided which court would resolve challenges to removal orders.

Civil rights groups representing the migrants say those claims are unfounded and based on unrelated tattoos.

The Justice Department admitted that one Salvadoran migrant with asylum protections was sent to his home country’s mega prison due to “an administrative error,” and despite immigration officials’ awareness that an immigration judge had ruled he could not be deported to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia is married to a U.S. citizen, with whom he has a 5-year-old child; he sought protection in the U.S. in 2019 under the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

Under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the president can detain and deport natives and citizens of an enemy nation. It has been used only three times in the nation’s history: during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt infamously ordered the internment of Japanese Americans under the statute.

Trump asserted broad Article II authority under the act, claiming that federal courts had no role in reviewing his actions.

“Drawing from the established English rule that ‘alien-enemies have no rights, no privileges, unless by the king’s special favour, during the time of war,’ the act confers on the president the power to determine which alien enemies are subject to removal,” the government wrote. “The ‘very nature’ of that sweeping authority ‘rejects the notion that courts may pass judgment upon the exercise of [the president’s] discretion.’”

Using the statute in peacetime, the ACLU argues, defeats the purpose of the Alien Enemies Act. The group unleashed a quick-moving legal battle when it sued to prevent the removal of five migrants who say they were wrongfully identified as gang members.

“The president’s effort to shoehorn a criminal gang into the AEA, on a migration-equals-invasion theory, is completely at odds with the limited delegation of wartime authority Congress chose to give him through the statute,” the ACLU said.

The ACLU won a temporary restraining order, but the administration allowed the planned flights to continue. Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg questioned whether the administration defied his order to “turn those planes around.”

Trump attacked Boasberg, who was appointed to D.C. Superior Court by President George W. Bush before President Barack Obama elevated him to the federal bench in 2012. The president claimed the judge was a radical lunatic, troublemaker and agitator whose animus against Trump guided his ruling. Last month, he called for Boasberg’s impeachment, earning a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee.

A divided panel on the D.C. Circuit upheld Boasberg’s ruling. U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee, expressed concern that approximately 300 similarly situated people would be “lined up and packed on planes without notice.”

While the migrants can’t use the Alien Enemies Act to challenge deportations, the majority said the migrants are entitled to judicial review — White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller suggested otherwise.

The court said migrants detained under the Alien Enemies Act must receive notice and be afforded a reasonable time to seek habeas relief before they are removed.

“‘It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in the context of removal proceedings,” the majority wrote. “So, the detainees are entitled to notice and opportunity to be heard ‘appropriate to the nature of the case.’"

This conflicts with the circumstances of the migrants deported in this case, Sotomayor noted, but she said now it is clear that the government cannot immediately resume deportations without notice.

“To the extent the government removes even one individual without affording him notice and a meaningful opportunity to file and pursue habeas relief, it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court,” Sotomayor wrote.

In a separate opinion, Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, denounced the use of the court’s emergency docket — which does not require full briefing or a public argument session — to decided complicated questions of law.

“With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace,” Jackson wrote. “But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”

The majority did not comment on controversy in the lower courts over whether the Trump administration disobeyed a court order. Sotomayor chastised the government for threatening the rule of law, and her colleagues for allowing the behavior.

“The government’s conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law,” Sotomayor wrote. “That a majority of this court now rewards the government for its behavior with discretionary equitable relief is indefensible. We, as a nation and a court of law, should be better than this.”

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