For the second time in less than a month, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ruled against the Trump administration’s dubious use of an 18th century law to deport immigrants including at least one person with protected status without due process.
In a 7-2 ruling — with far-right Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito dissenting — the high court found that President Donald Trump violated Venezuelan migrants’ right to due process as a class by trying to fast-track their deportation to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison in El Salvador by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act during peacetime.
The ruling is not a repudiation of Alien Enemies Act deportations and focuses solely on migrants’ due process rights.
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“The detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty,” the court’s opinion states. “Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster.”
“But it is not optimal for this court, far removed from the circumstances on the ground, to determine in the first instance the precise process necessary to satisfy the Constitution in this case,” the court continued and, referring to the federal appellate court that “erred in dismissing the detainees’ appeal for lack of jurisdiction,” said that “we remand the case to the 5th Circuit for that purpose.”
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel in the case, said Friday that “the court’s decision to stay removals is a powerful rebuke to the government’s attempt to hurry people away to a gulag-type prison in El Salvador.”
“The use of a wartime authority during peacetime, without even affording due process, raises issues of profound importance,” Gelernt added.
The Supreme Court opinion noted the case of Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland man with protected status who was wrongfully deported to CECOT in March. Last month, the high court unanimously ruled that Trump must facilitate Abrego García’s return to the United States. The Trump administration has resisted the order, despite the president proclaiming that “if the Supreme Court said, ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that.”
Steve Vadeck, a professor at Georgetown Law Center, told CNN Friday that “because lower courts have blocked use of the [Alien Enemies Act] in every other district in which the president has sought to invoke it, that means it’s effectively pausing all removals under the act until the 5th Circuit — and, presumably, the Supreme Court itself — conclusively resolves whether they’re legal and how much process is due if so.”
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Haines — who was appointed by Trump — issued the first court ruling supporting Alien Enemies Act deportations.
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